Misleading “study” which is not actually a study and more of an abstract that has not even been peer reviewed, just a press release by the American Heart Association. Fake news gao gao.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucel...ath-risk-by-91-are-premature/?sh=3e455e30428f
First of all, the study has not yet been published in a scientific journal and thus has not undergone rigorous scientific peer-review.
A press release from the AHA described the study as “preliminary research.” The bar for presenting a study at a scientific conference—even a reputable one like an AHA meeting—is a lot lower than that for publishing a study in a reputable scientific journal. It’s sort of like the difference between participating in a pre-season scrimmage and regular season football game. Getting on to the field during a pre-season scrimmage doesn’t mean that you will eventually make the roster for the regular season.
That’s because one cannot yet tell how well done this study was. A presentation at a scientific meeting typically cannot offer enough concrete verifiable details to evaluate the quality of the study and it’s strengths and limitations. So, take anything you hear from a scientific meeting with a grain of salt—that’s figuratively speaking, because too much salt is not good for your cardiovascular system.
Secondly, the study was an observational study, one that can at most show “hmm, that may be interesting” associations but cannot demonstrate cause-and-effect relationships. For the study, a team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Northwestern University, Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Wuhan University analyzed responses to the annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) that spanned the years 2003 through 2018 and triangulated it with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Death Index database on deaths that occurred during the 2003 through December 2019 time period. Their analysis found that people who had reported consuming all of their food within an eight hour time window each day had 91% higher rates of death due to cardiovascular disease compared to those who did not restrict their eating to such a time window. And those who reported eating everything within a more than eight but less than 10-hour time window had died from heart disease or stroke at a 66% higher rate than those who did not enforce such restrictions.
The trouble is one can not tell whether the higher cardiovascular death rates were actually due to the intermittent fasting or something else was going on with the 20,078 people who comprised the sample. This could have been a chicken or egg phenomenon—meaning that it’s not clear which might have come first rather than everyone was eating chicken or eggs. What if, for example, people were doing intermittent fasting
because they were already at greater risk for cardiovascular death? Data from NHANES could only provide limited information about the respondents lives. For example, it didn’t go into
Thirdly, the dietary data from NHANES is limited. Unless you were to disguise yourself as a bush and follow each person each and every day, you wouldn’t know how well they were adhering to intermittent fasting, what specifically they were eating each day and how they were eating. People can be notoriously inaccurate about reporting what they are doing each day. There’s a big difference between something like intermittent fasting along with a relatively healthful diet versus intermittent fasting along with an all-doughnut diet.
Finally, a single study is not enough to prove anything. Relying on a single study to draw a strong conclusion would be like declaring that one-hit wonder Chumbawamba would be the next Beatles after hearing the song “Tubthumping.” Instead, you really need to see a phenomenon hold across multiple studies before making a bigger deal about it.
Baby step on the right direction !
