By Marthe Fourcade, Bloomberg News
A study presented at a medical meeting called into question the safety of intermittent fasting, a popular weight loss strategy that involves restricting food intake to specific times.
The study, released in Chicago and published by the American Heart Association, discovered that limiting daily meals to just eight hours was linked to a 91% increase in the risk of dying from heart disease. The details of the study protocol were only provided in an abstract, leaving scientists with unanswered questions. The AHA confirmed that the study had been reviewed by other experts prior to its release.
As new drugs assist people with losing weight, lifestyle interventions focused on weight loss have been under scrutiny. Some doctors have questioned the study's findings, suggesting that differences, such as underlying heart health, between the fasting patients and the comparison group might have skewed the results. The comparison group consumed food over a daily period of 12 to 16 hours.
Keith Frayn, emeritus professor of human metabolism at the University of Oxford, expressed the importance of long-term studies on the effects of time-restricted eating, which is popular for reducing calorie intake. He highlighted that the presented abstract raised many unanswered questions.
Victor Zhong and a team from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine analyzed data from around 20,000 adults included in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The study examined questionnaires and death data from 2003 through 2019. However, since it partly relied on patient recall of their diet over two days, potential inaccuracies may be present. The average age of the roughly 20,000 patients was 48, and about half were men.
It's uncertain how long the patients maintained the intermittent fasting practice. Victor Zhong did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The abstract was presented at the AHA's Lifestyle Scientific Sessions meeting in Chicago.
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