Originally Posted by
terrymorse
A few things from this study poster are concerning. For the < 8-hour restricted eating group, which had the higher risk of CVD death:
- they had the highest BMI of all groups (29.9 vs 28.5 reference group)
- they self-reported a higher rate of CVD to begin with (8.6% vs 7.7% for reference group)
- they self-reported the highest rate of smoking (27.1% vs 16.9% reference group)
- they had the largest percentage of Black participants (23.2% vs 6.6% reference group)
- they were the smallest group in the study (414 out of 20,078), with just 31 CVD deaths
These are all reasons to be skeptical of this reported higher risk of CVD death from intermittent fasting.
I was just checking out the poster summary of the study. My OP is dated 3/19. The PowerPoint poster is dated the same, but I don't think that poster was up when I posted, so some of this is new to me, like the ages of the study groups. The group with youngest mean age, the IF group, had by far the highest death rate. IMO 31 out of 414 is not a small number, "just", and over a median timespan of 8 years, though the longest time period was 17 years, meaning that some participants might have been as old as 60 at study end. A possible correlation might be income/work. It's possible that some low income groups might wind up doing IF involuntarily and might have a typical low income diet, hence the high BMI.