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Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

Its a retrospective analysis that didn't even adjust for weight! "Factors that may also play a role in health, outside of daily duration of eating and cause of death, were not included in the analysis"

"It will also be critical to see a comparison of demographics and baseline characteristics across the groups that were classified into the different time-restricted eating windows – for example, was the group with the shortest time-restricted eating window unique compared to people who followed other eating schedules, in terms of weight..."

Im worried that this seems to be done by the American Heart Association which i thought was pretty reputable. Maybe the study is being reported on out of context or something.

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By the same token one could claim that any kind of diet is associated with an increased risk of death, but in reality this would be because overweight/obese people are the group most likely to seek out dietary interventions.

The wording of the questions also matter a lot but are near impossible to find. In this case, no one can read the actual paper since it is embargoed at this time.

This isn't how science is supposed to work, imagine if Maxwell published just a headline and hid his formulas behind paywalls.

It's preliminary research presented at a conference, in the last 24 hours.

So what, this isn't the next iphone. Publish the details of the study.

So far this is marketing clickbait. It's about as far from the scientific method as you can get.

Have you watched the presentation? I expect you'll see details there. Also, there are details at the American Heart Association article (another HN post).

Presentations of preliminary research is standard.

> It's about as far from the scientific method as you can get.

It's hard to grasp how that is true. I think more outrage and exaggeration are not helpful to anyone at this point in history.

It's just a poster being presented at a niche AHA sub-division meeting from some researchers in China trolling the US based NHANES data

It's presenting to present, just part of the game of academics, and it does not represent an opinion of the conference sponsor (AHA) at all

edit: here is the link to the abstract for anyone interested https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/20343/presentation/37...

> American Heart Association which i thought was pretty reputable

The same association that says soybean oil and cheerios are good for you

Why even do a study if you're going to do that? I've seen a few studies that just fail to account for really basic stuff.

Why?

I would suspect it is some type of clickbait "science".

The reason to do this study is to produce the headline and have us read it.

This certainly has nothing to do with how someone like Karl Popper would define science.

I can think of more than one cause for this unexpected result.

How about this:

Unhealthy fat people with big atheroma plaques enroll in study. The study gives them some motivation to improve their health (to look good on results). They start a diet => they get included in the "restricted diet" in the study, they also start exercising, atheroma plaque wall ruptures due to stress => heart attack => death.

It would seem that most people on the diet are prescribed it by a medical doctor for out of control weight problems.

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