31–40 of 66 posts
The study period is from 1999 to 2014. IF wasn't a mainstream practice then - meaning that the bulk of people who try to eat healthy may have been targeting more meals in that period than recent years. Just a possible hypothesis.
Am I wrong to have suspicions about the possibility that food conglomerates may have funded this study? I am not a conspiracy theorist, but with the number of dietary science that turned out to be wrong over time, I must be skeptical about every new study.
This I agree with. There is so much noise and so many confounding factors affecting the underlying data that you are bound to frequently get conflicting results. Compound this with the fact that studies with the most surprising (read: contrarian) results tend to get the most press, and you get an infinite see-saw in the literature.
> Am I wrong to have suspicions about the possibility that food conglomerates may have funded this study?
This I don't agree with. I think your model of more fasting equals less spending on food is overly simplicitic. The sort of health conscious people who are interested in IF tend to be wealthy and willing to spend on premium health related products. I'd wager that you can make a lot more money selling a few premium, organic, protein bars that you pitch as premium feel-full-for-12-hour-guaranteed products than you can by selling the same old breakfast cereals.
Besides, Occam's razor. Intermittent fasting is not a subject where there is or ever has been an overwhelming consensus in the literature, as opposed to say, climate science. It's not surprising or suspicious in the least to see a contrarian result in this field.
This post should be flagged/removed.
Am I wrong to have suspicions about the possibility that food conglomerates may have funded this study? I am not a conspiracy theorist, but with the number of dietary science that turned out to be wrong over time, I must be skeptical about every new study.
Maybe because those who are trying to diet are already obese?
I don't think intermittent fasting is 'weight loss dieting' In my limited personal experience, it's not obese people i see doing intermittent fasting - it's more like the keto crowd.
Like, one obvious reason people skip meals is that they don't have time. If you don't have time to eat, you're probably working long hours and really stressed out. Stress could easily contribute to CVD or otherwise take years off your life.
Another obvious reason to skip meals: you don't have money to buy food. Poverty is well known to lead to worse health outcomes.
Or one more: people skip meals because they have no appetite. What's a big cohort that routinely skips meals because they have no appetite? The elderly.
Maybe they ruled these kinds of things out in the full paper (I've only read the abstract) but so far I'm unimpressed.
“Among participant with three meals per day, a meal interval of ≤4.5 hours in two adjacent meals was associated with higher all-cause mortality.” So people who ate three meals a day ALSO fared poorly? Am I reading that right?
The lowest hazard rate/lowest all-cause mortality was among those who ate 3 meals a day and had 4.5+ hours between them.
This is not a study about "intermittent fasting", it is about people who skip meals. I don't know why they skip meals, they don't know why they skip meals, but I would not assume these are all super health conscious people engaging in deliberate intermittent fasting.
Can someone interpret the Hazard Ratios for me? What is a HR of 1.3 or 1.8 actually saying?
But the basic idea is that in the samples under the two different conditions, the ratio of the observed frequencies is 1.3 or 1.8. E.g. it'd be 1.8 if in the fasting sample they saw 3.6% bad outcome, while in the nonfasting sample they saw 2.0% bad outcome.