Intermittent fasting, a trendy method for weight-loss and targeting inflammation, has been flagged as a serious health risk, the American Heart Association announced Monday.
Results of a study presented at the association’s conference in Chicago this week revealed that adults following an eight-hour time-restricted eating schedule have a 91% higher chance of death by cardiovascular disease than those eating within the usual timeframe of 12-16 hours per day.
Though it is important to note that these are preliminary findings, said senior study author Victor Wenze Zhong, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in Shanghai, China.
“Although the study identified an association between an eight-hour eating window and cardiovascular death, this does not mean that time-restricted eating caused cardiovascular death,” Zhong said at the event.
Is intermittent fasting healthy?It can be, but ‘it’s not a magic solution’
How the study was conducted, what else it showed
The independent study lead by Zhong and his team looked at approximately 20,000 adults in the U.S. from 2003 to 2018 using data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for its National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The association tracked dietary patterns in people with an average age of 49 who documented their food intake for at least two days within one year, the association reported.
That data was then compared to…
