Intermittent fasting — a dieting strategy that limits when someone can eat each day — has been linked to a 91% higher risk of heart-related death in a large study. This risk was tied to eating in an eight-hour or shorter window in the 24-hour day, compared with a more typical 12- to 16-hour window.
"It's quite possible to eat a really low-quality diet while time-restricted eating," Christopher Gardner, professor of medicine at Stanford University, told Live Science. It may also be that some participants with restricted eating windows were facing food insecurity and not eating well or enough, he added."We don't know everything yet. I'll wait for more," he said of the new research.
By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.The study uncovered a link between eight-hour eating windows and cardiovascular death, but due to its design, it cannot say whether this eating schedule caused the deaths — it shows only a correlation.
Dr. Wendy Bennett, an associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, noted that this study suggests a need to scrutinize the"fad diet push that people should be doing time-restricted eating." Bennett and others published research in January 2023 that also raised doubts about the purported benefits of intermittent fasting, suggesting that it's not a successful weight-loss strategy in a six-year time window.