As a big fan of IF, I find this really depressing.
Factors that may also play a role in health, outside of daily duration of eating and cause of death, were not included in the analysis.
So could be that people with higher risk already had higher risk before changing their eating. Sounds likely since IF is frequently used as a diet. Limitations they mentioned also included self-reported data, which is notoriously bad when it comes to diet.
Honestly, it sounds like it’s not a very useful study. So don’t get too depressed on account of this.
That sounds like a plausible explanation, but there’s no way to know because there’s no data. As you said, this study is kinda useless.
Not useless, this correlation was totally unexpected, they were expecting to see a benefit. It’s not definitive though, but retrospective reviews like this are important first steps even though they carry many caveats. Now this data could be used as justification for funding and grants for further prospective studies into this to better quantify risks and benefits of intermittent fasting.
Important to note that this is preliminary research
It is interesting though. My hunch is that people who follow time restrictive diets tend to fall into a higher risk category to begin with. For instance because they were already overweight
This shouldn’t be taken seriously. It’s a very quick and dirty analysis presented at a conference without peer review. Start worrying when/if the scientific paper comes out, which might be years or never.
Doesn’t matter if it’s peer reviewed. There isn’t enough data to establish causality.
Chances are people who do those sorts of diets are already at risk. That’s the super important data points we don’t have.
So even if their peers confirm the data is accurate and their analysis is accurate it doesn’t mean anything without further study.
Peer review is unfortunately not a magic bullet. And conference abstracts do get a form of peer review because that’s how they get accepted for the conference.
The actual problem is that academics can pad their CVs doing terrible research and publishing it with alarmist headlines.
When they’ve written it up, it will get through peer review, somewhere, somehow, because peer review does not work. The fight will happen in the letters pages (if anyone has the energy) and won’t change a damn thing anyway.
Presentations don’t get peer review, at least not in biology (my field). I agree that peer review is totally broken though.
I didn’t say they did. But authors don’t just get to submit an abstract and have it accepted, it has been selected by whatever committee process was set up to sift the submissions. Many conferences will do a better job than the journals but mileage varies all over the fucking shop.
But my main bugbear here is the idea that peer review means anything. The dross that gets published is beyond depressing. But it’s probably worth noting that dross is much less likely to get submitted to a conference because a) fuck all CV points for an abstract and b) getting accepted means registering for the conference and turning up to get your peer review in person. Scammers don’t do that. Although there have been entire scam conferences so … heuristics don’t work any which way, really.
Sounds like this “study” (aka a self-reported, retrospective, epidemiological survey - which is a type of statistics that I think just confuses the public to call a study but whatever) needs a lot more work to say anything with certainty. The kicker in the article is this I think:
“…the different windows of time-restricted eating was determined on the basis of just two days of dietary intake.” Yikes. That, and it sounds like they didn’t control for any of the possible confounding variables such as nutrient intake, demographics, weight, stress, or basically any other risk factors or possible explanations. Its entirely possible that once they actually control for this stuff, the correlation could shrink to almost nothing or even reverse when we see that people who tried this diet were just baseline higher risk than who didn’t.
I do 16:8 IF. It’s the best and easiest way I’ve lost weight AND maintained it. I can’t imagine how eating less (and not starving yourself) and carrying less weight around can be worse for your health than eating throughout the course of the day.
The study’s limitations included its reliance on self-reported dietary information, which may be affected by participant’s memory or recall and may not accurately assess typical eating patterns. Factors that may also play a role in health, outside of daily duration of eating and cause of death, were not included in the analysis.
This definitely needs better methods of study, and peer reviews of course. Not sure if the study covered what participants were actually eating, because I would guess that would be the main factor.
The article itself quotes another doctor saying:
“However, the long-term health effects of time-restricted eating, including risk of death from any cause or cardiovascular disease, are unknown.”
I hope this study is proven wrong as IF has been the one “diet” plan I was actually able to do and keep doing.
You’re right to point out this is an observational, retrospective study showing only a correlation. So there are a lot of caveats there. I think this raises some potential concerns though that should be looked into further. Ideally in a prospective and more controlled way to better isolate the effects of intermittent fasting.
There’s been many times in medical history where something that seems to make sense doesn’t pan out in the end or even causes harm. Studies like this are just step one, even the authors state they were expecting to show benefits and that this result was a complete surprise to them. We definitely need to be looking into this further to better quantify potential risks and benefits of intermittent fasting, especially with its popularity. It would be a shame if intermittent fasting did turn out to carry this risk though, there’s many people like you who have had success with it. It may be in the end that there are some populations it’s appropriate for and others it’s not. Needs more study for sure.
IF is used for a lot of different things. I also do the 16/8 which basically means i eat from 12 to 20. I do it with 3 meals and it works great for me. It also helps that where i live people eat lunch really early so i just skip breakfast and my schedule kinda lines up with the normal one here.
I agree more and better data is good. If this is repeated or a similar study is done and the same results are in, then I would start to evaluate.
Lots of studies also show that moderate induced stress (fasting, cold plunges, saunas) do indeed cause helpful changes, but studying humans is so complicated that we could still be wrong.
There’s no point repeating it. This kind of study is hopeless for answering this sort of question. People go on this kind of diet because they’re concerned about their health, often their weight and general cardiovascular health. It’s not surprising that they’re more likely to die of things related to their reason for going on the diet in the first place.
It’s not quite as starkly obvious as “people who choose to jump out of planes are more likely to die in a parachute accident” but it’s close.
Quick question. Was doing a 14/10 and found my weight was increasing is that normal in your experience?
I decided to just do normal without the restrictions but kept the no snacking.
It took a bit of time (few weeks) to start losing, but I never gained more weight since starting; so not in my experience. I did notice at the beginning that I was compensating by eating a lot during the 8-hour window, because I was afraid of going hungry. After around a month, I got used to it and just started eating normally. I just make sure I eat my last meal exactly right before I’m supposed to stop, so I don’t go hungry. If I eat too late (i.e. night out with friends, etc.), I just adjust and eat later the next morning. Stopping the late snacking is definitely one of the reasons I think I lost weight.
I may give it another kick my challenge is I take my pills in the morning and need food and I’m not gonna stop eating at 4pm. Gotta figure out how to shift things around. So far just cutting out the crap has helped immensely
