Intermittent fasting linked to higher risk of death

Intermittent fasting is practiced by fit celebrities like Jennifer Aniston, Kourtney Kardashian and Gisele Bündchen. Many credit the method, which restricts food intake to a strict time period in the day, to keeping them slim.

But a new study says intermittent fasting can also send you to an early grave.

Published in the journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the study determined that skipping breakfast is associated with a higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

Also adversely affected, according to the researchers, were people who ate three meals a day but at least two meals less than 4.5 hours apart.

“Our research revealed that individuals eating only one meal a day are more likely to die than those who had more daily meals,” said lead author Dr. Yangbo Sun of the department of preventive medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis.

“Among them, participants who skip breakfast are more likely to develop fatal cardiovascular diseases, while those who skip lunch or dinner increase their risk of death from all causes.”

Researchers said that missing meals led to people consuming more calories in a shorter period of time and that overloaded the body’s metabolism with glucose — and thus led to other metabolic issues.

The study looked at data from more than 24,000 Americans over the age of 40 and found that 40% of them ate less than three meals a day.

Those who ate less than three meals a day also tended to have unhealthy habits like smoking or drinking alcohol. They were younger, male and non-Hispanic black with lower family income and less education.

“At a time when intermittent fasting is widely touted as a solution for weight loss, metabolic health and disease prevention, our study is important for the large segment of American adults who eat fewer than three meals each day,” said Sun.

Sun recommends eating at least two to three meals spread throughout the day.

The study’s senior investigator, Dr. Wei Bao, with the epidemiology department in the College of Public Health at the University of Iowa, said the findings “are significant even after adjustments for dietary and lifestyle factors such as smoking, alcohol use, physical activity levels, energy intake, and diet quality and food insecurity. Our findings are based on observations drawn from public data and do not imply causality.”

This isn’t the only study to debunk the benefits of intermittent fasting. In 2020, researchers from the University of California at San Francisco found that those who intermittently fasted for 12 weeks only lost a half-pound more than a group of people who ate normally.