Study on Time Restricted Eating (TRE), a form of intermittent fasting (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Study on Time Restricted Eating (TRE), a form of intermittent fasting (2020)

twitter.com

11 pointsTomte10 comments

I have done tre twice. the first time it didn't work the second time it did. the difference: the first time I definitely ate more (in fact a whole day's worth) of calories in my eating window. the second time I just ate a normal meal.

I think if tre helps you restrict calories it works.

I've often wondered what a non-uniformly distributed eating pattern results in from a dietary and health perspective. I wonder because I have spend many contiguous hours hacking all while growing up and into my professional career to the point that I barely have a 'sense of hunger' and have to remind myself to eat when/if I notice that I'm thinking really slow. For my first full-time job I regularly used to have breakfast, then pretty much coffee all day and late at night try to catch dinner before everything's closed.

Anecdotally I've always had trouble keeping weight on and have frequent blood-sugar level issues. Usually nothing too serious, light fainting/feeling -> drink some orange juice.

The author's excitement is premature. The TREAT Study is patiently dismembered - on methodological grounds - by Sigma Nutrition, who are not zealots for TRE (or any magical thinking, for that matter).

Starts at 5.15

https://sigmanutrition.com/episode355/

> So in summary: 1) no matter how you slice it, prescription of TRE is not a very effective weight loss strategy; 2) There was no advantage to TRE when compared to a proper control group; 3) What weight was lost looked to come more from muscle mass than fat mass

This comes no where close to the anecdotal evidence Ive seen. There are obviously some confounding factors involved.

Sadly I cannot tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

I think not sarcasm. I’ve found that an 8 hour eating window 1200-2000 works very well for me. N=1

I'm sorry, I can't take anyone seriously who says "this study is obviously flawed because my personal anecdote differs". It's like someone claiming climatologists must all be wrong because it was cold last winter.

Not sarcasm. I've been a gym rat for the past 30 years, working out with dozens of people in serious fashion over that time spam. If you want to attribute the following to bro-science or small non-scientific study samples (this would be about a N=45) go right ahead, it's not going bother me. I started using IF around 15 years ago after a workout partner recommended it to me. I had great success with it and have been a big proponent of it since. I have never seen anyone lose muscle mass which would be counter to their efforts in the gym (worked mainly with strength athletes and bodybuilders). Bodybuilders will frequently use IF when on a cut but not prepping for a competition (that's usually a different protocol). Strength athletes will use IF to lose excess fat making them faster and more explosive. I've seen it work too many times. Some of these guys competed in their varying sports so any sign of counterproductive output would have resulted in them immediately abandoning it.

I think the confounding factors are quality of the diet, level of exercise, sleep patterns, and overall health state. None of these as far as I can tell are accounted for in the study. Going further there are countering studies (for example https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20300080/) that show that fasting (TR, ADF, etc.) are muscle sparing. This only makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint since the human race would no longer exist at the first major famine, which we've managed to survive a few times over. So, I think there's more to the story here than what the good doctor presented.

> There are obviously some confounding factors involved.

In the study, or in the anecdotes you're familiar with? People are ashamed of their weight, and also ashamed of caring about their weight, so I'd expect a significant degree of selection bias because we're more likely to hear about diets that work than those that don't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com