In just the last hour or so,
we've got this new study around something that you might
have heard of,
you might have done. You might be doing yourself called
intermittent fasting IF,
and it finds that it may nearly double the risk
of dying from a heart issue.
So remember, this is a kind of diet where you
only eat like at certain times a day or within
a certain time window.
This study examined its impact on 20,000 Americans,
the whole thing raising some red flags about what's become
a pretty popular way for some folks to try to
lose weight.
Now the authors of this study say that fasting for
16 hours or more every day in their words,
significantly increased the risk of some kind of a heart
disease related death.
I want to bring in our medical contributor Dr.
Kavita Patel for NBC News here
Smoof. There's a lot of studies out there about IF
we've covered them,
some of them say no material impact.
This one clearly says there's more of a risk.
Other studies have said it's actually good for heart health,
it reduces inflammation, etcetera. There's a slew of those kinds
of studies.
What how are we supposed to think and not a
person without a medical degree.
What are we supposed to do?
Yeah, Hallie. So the most important thing to kind of
put in context is it's a presentation at the American
Heart Association.
That doesn't diminish, but it's not a peer reviewed journal
article quite yet and there are a lot of caveats
to it.
The most important caveat is that this was self reported
data on 20,000 people.
That's important. But it was based,
that's a lot of people,
A lot of people self reported on about two days
of their diet kind of pattern.
So I'm not saying that they didn't always follow like
an 18 hour off eating in a six hour or
16 hour off in an 8 hour eating window.
But by that you mean people would say I'm only
going to eat from,
you know 11:00 to 7:00 today and then self reported,
right. So anytime it's self reported you have to take
it with a grain of salt.
And then #2 we don't know about what these people
ate.
So for all we know,
people were eating pretty bad food and it does doesn't
matter when you eat bad food,
it's bad for you. So we need to look at
the quality of the food and other factors that affect
diet.
OK, but can we make an assessment as medical professionals,
which I'm not one, but can can there be an
assessment made on intermittent fasting?
Does it work? Is it good or is it problematic?
Right. So I think for all people intermittent fasting should
be done with personalization.
So if I were to walk out and say to
every patient who needs to either have a better diet,
needs to modify their heart risk factors,
you should do intermittent fasting.
I would be negligent as a doctor.
What I should say is how can we help you
eat better?
Because Hallie, if it helps you to eat better by
only eating in an 8 hour window and you're going
to get more fruits and vegetables,
it's what you eat. Not necessarily when you eat.
There are several, probably smaller groups of people,
certain ethnicities, perhaps certain genetic subtypes,
where the time you eat matters.
But for the most part,
the majority of people, what you eat matters.
It's what you put in,
and that's what really matters.
Do you think there's been enough studies,
enough research done on IF to be able to make
some of those clear assessments?
I think there's been enough studies to show that there
is no one diet that can solve them all.
And I and I think that what we should do
is not get so stuck on the type of diet,
OK, but start talking about food and food deserts are
real.
People can't afford healthy food.
People don't know how to make affordable food for their
families.
That's a much better conversation than is it 16 hours
on or 8 hours off to days on,
five days off. And I've seen some dangerous eating patterns
when people get stuck with those habits and they're neglecting
calories.
I've seen people actually eating too little.
And this is 1 Pearl.
The people in that 20,000 found that they had less
muscle mass.
Now it just tells you they're probably not getting the
right amounts of protein and macro nutrients,
which is very important, so important,
so interesting. Doctor Patel, come back anytime because we will
have that conversation as you know.
Thank you.