Intermittent diet: Does health risk override weight-loss benefits?

A study, which may force health freaks to take note and sit up before they plan to skip their meals as a slimming device, suggests skipping meals and restricting mealtimes to eight hours a day may heighten associated health risks like heart ailments and death as a result.

The study found that intermittent fasting – or limiting of meals to around eight hours a day – increased the risk of death from heart-related disorders to 91 per cent.

Under intermittent fasting, people divide the day into 'eating times' and 'non-eating times'. Typically, food is taken across one or two meals over eight hours, followed by 16 hours of fasting. The eating period could vary from four to 10 hours. 

Study details

According to a Bloomberg report, the study was conducted by a team of researchers led by Victor Zhong, professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine.

It analysed data from about 20,000 adults who were part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US public health agency.

However, the findings of the study were called into question by some experts present in the meeting as the results were made public in an abstract form.

Questions remain

The study was published by the American Heart Association (AHA) and presented in an abstract form at its Lifestyle Scientific Sessions meeting in Chicago on Monday (March 18). It is not peer-reviewed, which makes experts question its accuracy. 

"Time-restricted eating is popular as a means of reducing calorie intake. This work is very important in showing that we need long-term studies on the effects of this practice. But this abstract leaves many questions unanswered," Bloomberg quoted Keith Frayn, emeritus professor of human metabolism at the University of Oxford, as saying.

Disagreeing with the study’s outcomes, experts were of the opinion that the results could have been impacted by differences between the fasting subjects and the comparison group in terms of their underlying heart health.

According to experts, the study relied on questionnaires, requiring subjects to recall what they ate in the past days between intermittent fasting, which could leave scope for inaccuracies to creep in.

Fasting patterns

A large proportion of the population skips breakfast, and hence follows intermittent fasting unknowingly. However, the eating pattern has gained popularity over the past decade or so, and is touted to offer benefits such as weight management and improved gut health. 

The sceptics insist that the fasting is just another form of calorie reduction, and the time slots do not matter. No conclusive study has been conducted on this yet.