A study of more than 20,000 adults in the US found that those who followed a type of intermittent fasting, where they ate eight hours a day, had a 91% higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease compared to those who ate 12-16 hours a day.

In the preliminary study, researchers reviewed information on dietary patterns for participants in the annual US National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys from 2003-2018 and compared it with data on people who died in the US from 2003 to 2019 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Death Index database.

As they identified, time-restricted diets did not reduce the overall risk of death from any cause. In contrast, those who followed intermittent fasting with eating eight hours of food per day had a 91% increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

They found that the increased risk of cardiovascular death was also seen in people living with heart disease or cancer. Also, among people with existing cardiovascular disease, eating less than ten hours a day was associated with a 66% higher risk of death from heart disease or stroke.

In contrast, eating more than 16 hours a day was associated with a lower risk of cancer mortality among people with cancer.

“Limiting daily eating time to short periods of time, such as eight hours a day, has gained popularity in recent years as a way to lose weight and improve heart health,” says study lead author Victor Wenze Zong, professor and chairman of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in Shanghai, China.

“Although this type of diet was popular because of its potential short-term benefits, our study clearly shows that, compared with a typical diet time range of 12-16 hours per day, shorter diet duration was not associated with longer life span,” he adds.

Limitations of the study included its reliance on self-reported dietary information, which may be influenced by participants’ memory and may not accurately assess typical eating habits.

Factors that may also play a role in health, other than daily food consumption and cause of death, were not included in the analysis.

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“Overall, this study suggests that time-restricted food consumption may have short-term benefits but long-term adverse effects.

When the study is presented in its entirety, it will be interesting and useful to learn more details of the analysis, such as the quality of the dietary nutrients of the different subgroups of participants,” says Christopher Gardner, professor of medicine at Stanford University in California and chair of the American Heart Association’s 2023 Scientific Statement on Dietary Guidelines drafting committee.

He notes that it will also be critical to see if a comparison of demographic and other characteristics of participants and traditional cardiometabolic risk factors, such as weight and stress, has been included.

The results of the preliminary study were presented at an American Heart Association conference in Chicago.