8h time-restricted eating linked to a 91% higher risk of cardiovascular death | Hacker News Reader

8h time-restricted eating linked to a 91% higher risk of cardiovascular death

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42 pointsta98825 comments

This Yahoo! News article [1] (surprisingly) has some good analysis I haven't seen discussed elsewhere. For example, there were significantly more smokers and African Americans in the IF group. Both of these subgroups are more likely to die of cardiovascular causes. It doesn't mean that there's "no there there", but it sure points in that direction.

1: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/a-new-study-raises-concerns-...

Thank you that's exactly why I posted that here, trying to gather the collective sleuthing about the subject.

8h time-restricted eating might well be bad for you, but this study doesn't show it, as far as I can tell. They make no effort to control for, say, how obese the average cohort is that's doing an 8h time-restricted eating plan, or how fit the non-time-restricted eaters are. Future research, apparently.

The study does seem to show that 8h time-restricted eating doesn't radically lower the risk of death, at least not enough to dominate any selection bias by dieters.

Also, note that it's a self-reported study, so we are really talking about people who claim to be following a time-restricted eating plan.

By Hacker News standards, no research is good enough. Where do you find information that you find credible?

>By Hacker News standards, no research is good enough

First, "hacker news" isn't a hive mind, so the idea of "Hacker News standards" is non-nonsensical. From an academic/epidemiological perspective though, I think it's fairly uncontroversial that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard.

> I think it's fairly uncontroversial that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard.

Software with 99.999999% uptime [0] may be the gold standard, but that's not always practical, and we can benefit from other software too.

If everything with a flaw in the world is useless, then everything in the world is useless, including all these HN comments and whatever you and I do for our livings.

[0] I'm too lazy to actually imagine what the gold standard for software development is, sorry.

>Software with 99.999999% uptime [0] may be the gold standard

No one seriously has that many nines as their "gold standard", because that's almost always too safe, which has costs:

>We strive to make a service reliable enough, but no more reliable than it needs to be. That is, when we set an availability target of 99.99%,we want to exceed it, but not by much: that would waste opportunities to add features to the system, clean up technical debt, or reduce its operational costs. In a sense, we view the availability target as both a minimum and a maximum. The key advantage of this framing is that it unlocks explicit, thoughtful risktaking.

https://sre.google/sre-book/embracing-risk/

see also: The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

In this case though, other commenters have pointed out plausible reasons for why the cohort studies can't be trusted. There's also lack of evidence for the casual mechanism behind the effect, so on the whole it seems fairly reasonable to demand better evidence.

Use HN as a bs detector: a more critical analysis to minimize bias (though not error prone)

You are perhaps arbitrarily choosing what is BS, based on the old primate behavior (I'm subject to it too) of choosing a 'team'. If my team is HN, I look for ways it can be winning; I root for it.

IOW, how do you know where the BS is, HN or the OP? Another way of framing it: Which is the BS, a quick take by a random commenter on an Internet bulletin board or a scientifically researched, written, reviewed, and published document, often done over years, by an expert in the field with a PhD?

I've said before: If the OP author posted on HN and said 'PhD who does research in this field here, and I think ...', they'd be upvoted. But if they do 1000x the work and 'post' to a scientific journal, it's almost always rejected by many on HN.

You’ve now posted 4 meta comments about comments. If you have something substantive to say about the study, say it.

The American Heart Association is considered by many, at best, a staid organization pumping decades old dietary advice (like the food pyramid based 'Standard American Diet'), a lot of which is questionable according to newer research. Stuff like endorsing industrially produced seed oil as 'healthy fat'.

Some go further and accuse them of serving industry interests. Whatever the case may be, I personally pay the AHA very little attention, based on my own experience and research into diet and health, and how it squares up with their 1950s-era advice.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9794145/ (search for AHA)

Who do you pay attention to that is more accurate and reliable?

A consensus between different but reliable sources of data to avoid bias: pubmed (scientific publications), nih (gov.), HN (qualitative), etc. Read and make your own judgement: does the evidence corroborate or contradict?

ex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387593

I had no idea. Thanks for directing me to more readings on them.

Related discussion from earlier today on a (flagged EurekaAlert!) article covering the same study:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39749647

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39749647

I wonder if this study accounted for the type of food.

I'm going to guess that the 8H group was more likely to eat a keto/carnivore diet because they have the discipline/awareness to do a fast so they should know about keto/carnivore diets and be able to stick to them.

I also wonder if the 8H group was less healthy on average to begin with - that's why they're trying an 8H fast to get healthier.

This was a post hoc analysis of self report eating patterns from pre 2018. I don’t think the respondents were following specific diets, was even IF a thing then? One could assume the 8-hour group does include a people that skip breakfast, and binge out on junk later with no plan of eating healthy.

It does not seem like the authors made even the slightest effort to control for any confounds.

Not to defend the authors, but I tried out IF around 2013-2014(ish) by randomly bumping into it on the internet. So definitely a thing pre-2018!

a different conclusion:

Feasibility of time-restricted eating and impacts on cardiometabolic health in 24-h shift workers: The Healthy Heroes randomized control trial Cell Metabolism 34, 1442–1456.e1–e7, October 4, 2022 e7 DOI10.1016/j.cmet.2022.08.018

https://www.salk.edu/news-release/time-restricted-eating-imp...

Well that’s disappointing, but there were not enough details to understand the methodology. Were the time restricters less healthy at the start?

Also, this gave me a bit of a pause

  The study included data for NHANES participants who were at least 20 years old at enrollment, between 2003-2018, and had completed two 24-hour dietary recall questionnaires within the first year of enrollment.

Does this mean they are relying upon two food surveys per year to bucket people?

What's strange is that 8 hours is not even considered IF usually.

What makes you say that? The first time I even heard of IF they were recommending 8 hours a day. I know there are different formats but 8 was definitely within IF

Sorry I was wrong to say that. What I meant is that 8 hours is usually considered a minimum to give the insulin pathways enough time to rest. Especially if you're trying to tackle pre-diabetes etc. I am suspicious about this study, because of where it's coming from. I guess the real problem is not enough is known about this whole area.

the most basic is 16+8 split, there 8hrs is the eating window. This equates to skip breakfast and no late snacking.

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