“Intermittent Fasting Leads to Heart Disease” Study

A lot of DM’s asking me about a new study linking intermittent fasting to an increased risk of heart disease…

Unless you control for activity, nutritional quality, and of course, body fat?

It’s not very valuable.

There’s no mechanism by which doing a short daily fast would increase the risk of heart disease.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into this study.

The study looked at 20,000 people who were asked about what they ate on 2 occasions over the course of a year.
The researchers then reviewed death records of this same group of people 7 years later.
They found that the people who self-reported that they ate in an 8-hour or less eating window experienced double the risk of death from cardiovascular events.
It’s an observational study, and the findings haven’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

This study was spread all over the internet.

Stuff like this gets clicks!

But just shortly after, this same study has been getting criticized by researchers and Cardiologists.

An article[1] on Medscape quoted Sean Heffron, MD, Cardiologist at the Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease at NYU.

Just because something is correlated doesn’t mean it causes it.

Here’s an example: The more firefighters present at a fire, the more damage is caused. But more firefighters don’t cause damage—they’re called to the scene when the fire is larger.

A person eating in an 8-hour window could be doing so for another reason.

Maybe they are working 3 stressful jobs.

And it’s their busy and stressful life causing the heart issues, not their eating window.

Another MD’s take on the study…

This study is NOT scientifically sound.

It’s not published.

It’s not peer-reviewed.

It’s 2 days of self-reported data, followed by 7 years of follow-up.

And MOST people who skip breakfast aren’t actually doing intermittent fasting.

They have poor nutritional habits.
Skip breakfast, eat fast food, and snack on junk.
Eat too much and don’t exercise enough.

Just saying someone is “Intermittent Fasting” because they don’t eat breakfast doesn’t tell me a lot.

If you skip breakfast and eat questionable stuff the rest of the day?

Things will not wind up great for you health-wise.

I like intermittent fasting as part of a strategy to effortlessly keep calories low enough to get lean.

It also helps me be more productive.

I like pushing back my first meal to 5 hours after I wake up.

This allows me to focus and get work done during the day.

Once I have accomplished my most important tasks, I eat a small 500-ish calorie meal.

This gives me tons of calories to work with once dinner rolls around.

I can feast, relax, and socialize at night.

For instance, look at this dinner I had in Barcelona last summer.

I was able to eat like this and stay lean because I kept calories lower during the day.

This is why I love fasting the first 5 hours of the day.

You get to feast and socialize at night.

Even have a few drinks and still stay lean.

You CAN’T eat dinners like and stay lean if you have already had 1,000-1,500 calories before going into dinner.

I used to spread my meals out evenly.

The problem is that I would always inevitably wind up eating more than I planned for dinner.

As a result could never get shredded.

Fasting was the thing that made getting and staying lean possible for me.

Fasting works well for a social lifestyle.

And is healthy (despite what that poorly designed study suggested).

I found the closest study [2] that looked at eating in a similar way to how I recommend eating with my Kinobody programs.

One of the groups used an 8-hour eating window, which is in line with how I like to eat when getting lean.

It took 139 patients over the course of a year.
Half used calorie restriction only.
Half used the same calorie restriction but ate all their food in an 8-hour eating window (time-restricted eating).

Results?

The weight loss was similar…

“Changes in weight were not significantly different in the two groups at the 12-month assessment.”

They measured fat loss, but also looked at cardiovascular outcomes.

“Both time-restricted eating and daily calorie restriction were associated with reduced systolic and diastolic blood pressure over 12 months, with no substantial between-group differences. Fasting glucose levels, 2-hour postprandial glucose levels, scores on the insulin disposition index and HOMA–IR, and lipid levels were similar in the two groups during the 12 months of the trial.”

Fasting can be healthy.

Like any other diet strategy, you need to eat quality food if you want to be healthy.

It’s not like fasting can magically make an unhealthy diet healthy.

Harvard Medical School summarizes it perfectly with this article title…