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- cross-posted to:
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As a big fan of IF, I find this really depressing.
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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.
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.
I like this explanation.
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 overweightI also wonder if their nutrient density or food choices differ from the non-time restricted participants.
Overweight people who are attempting to diet are more likely to have diseases linked to being overweight than average.
Truly a groundbreaking and shocking study! /s
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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.
Yep, I don’t see any way they could prove statistical significance as they could not reject the null hypothesis.
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.
I’ve been to 30 or so national or international conferences in biology, and have never had an abstract rejected. I don’t think I’m doing anything special, so I assume pretty much everyone gets in. More presenters = more money. I’ve also been on the selection committee side and it is definitely not more selective than peer review. We’re only reviewing an abstract, usually under 100 words. Prob varies by field though. Maybe medical conferences are selective?
You can’t generalise about conferences any more than you can generalise about individual journals, or publishers, or peer review.
Lack of peer review is not a standalone criticism. The problems with this study are obvious and you do not need to rely on an imaginary peer reviewer to point them out.
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 dont care about IF, but yep.
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.
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.
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.
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
Oh yeah definitely a challenge if you need take meds in the morning. I do 10am-6pm and sometimes start as late as 12 noon if I ate too late the night before. Can you delay your meds to at least 9:30 maybe? But yeah, I think just cutting out the snacks is already a good thing, and if it works for you, I don’t think you need to strictly follow the 8-hour window if it means affecting your meds.
Among people with existing cardiovascular disease, an eating duration of no less than 8 but less than 10 hours per day was also associated with a 66% higher risk of death from heart disease or stroke.
This is odd. 10 hours is for example breakfast at 10AM and dinner by 8PM which to me sounds like a typical eating pattern. Suspicious.
“Living determined to be the leading cause of dying.”
Theres a big difference between time restricted eating and disordered eating. I wonder if the study lumps them together. An example is somone who follows the same schedule every day, breakfast at noon, dinner at 8 is doing IF. Someone who eats too much monday then compensates by only eating for four hours on Tuesday and Wednesday is more like a case of disordered eating.
Id wager with how new IF is and the fact that the impetuous to start fasting rarely comes from doctors, that a lot of people aren’t doing IF in the most healthy way. My doctor approves of it for me since we do have data showing its good for blood glucose and people at risk of diabetes.
The link says that the study participants were 20,000 adults intermittently fasting with the 8 hour schedule.
They also said it was self reported so the person I describe easily fits into that category. Their binge days could also be during a time restricted window and it would still be disordered eating.
People who attempt diets have elevated risk of cardiovascular death
☝️A more accurate title based on the discussion in this thread.
I’m OMAD weekdays, then two meals a day weekends. I don’t want to return to what I was before. I get so tired during the day after I eat a breakfast or lunch and was much more happier and energetic when I tried IF.
I have a feeling this study will turn out like every study done on coffee. Every other year coffee is either great or bad for your health. Next year, we may hear something different from IF, but this one does make be think twice.
This is so obviously confounded. If I told you that people who use asthma inhalers have a 91% higher risk of dying of asthma, would you conclude that it was the inhalers killing them?
It’s an interesting correlation, but it’s still based on self-reported data in an epidemiological study. What were those people eating? What was their activity level? What time of day were they eating? How did their overall calorie intake compare to non-IF diets?
I didn’t read the original paper, just this linked article, but it doesn’t sound like those factors were considered. There is definitely a lot more work needed to establish a causal relationship.
These are some of the same questions I had. Maybe eating like this really does kill you but maybe it’s actually pointing at some other factors they didn’t even consider. Where did they find the study participants? Were they all overweight or obese and using IF to lose weight? Did they eat a healthy diet, or was it 8 hours a day of non-stop hamburgers and pizza? Did they exercise or were they physically active? It just sounds way too general to draw such dire conclusions. Again, maybe the time restriction is actually the problem but it doesn’t sound like there enough info here to actually determine that.
The Plant Based Morning Show did a podcast on it this morning. It starts at about 23 minutes in. I haven’t listened to it yet but if anyone is interested in more discussion on it you can get some there.
So give us the dataset then, researchers.
