Intermittent fasting each day boosts risk of cardiovascular death
People who restricted their eating across fewer than eight hours per day had a 91 percent higher risk of cardiovascular death than those who ate across 12 to 16 hours per day, an analysis of more than 20,000 U.S. adults reveals.
The preliminary research was presented Monday at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology and Prevention | Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Scientific Sessions 2024 in Chicago. The meeting is intended to offer the latest science on population-based health and wellness and lifestyle implications.
“Our study is the first investigation to examine the association between eight-hour, time-restricted eating and mortality,” senior author Victor Wenze Zhong, a professor and department chair of epidemiology and biostatistics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China, told UPI via email.
However, the findings still need replication and can’t prove that eighthour, time-restricted eating causes cardiovascular death. They also don’t support long-term use of this approach for preventing cardiovascular death and for improving longevity, he said.
Meanwhile, Zhong noted that “time-restricted eating has gained popularity as a dietary intervention that limits food consumption to a four-to-12-hour window each day.”
Previous research has found that time-restricted eating — a type of meal timing that falls under intermittent fasting — improves several cardiometabolic health measures such as blood pressure, blood glucose and cholesterol levels.
However, Zhong said, those findings were based on short-term, randomized, controlled trials, generally conducted within a onemonth-to-one-year period, not long-term studies.
“We had expected that long-term adoption of eight-hour, time-restricted eating would be associated with lower risk of cardiovascular death and even all-cause death,” said Zhong, who has a doctorate in nutritional epidemiology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.