[thomascgalvin]

From the abstract:

> Fourteen healthy subjects fasted from dawn to sunset for over 14 h daily. Fasting duration was 30 consecutive days.

Edit:

There's an infographic further down that changes how I read this. Participants have a late dinner (after sunset) and an early breakfast (pre-sunrise), and fast for at least 14 hours while awake. Traditional IF counts time asleep as part of the fast, and this does not.

However, the pre-dawn breakfast essentially resets the fasting clock every morning, which means subjects have two fasting periods per day: about 8 hours while asleep, and about 14 hours while awake.

That leaves a two-hour eating window at night, and a short (let's call it thirty minutes) eating window in the morning.

This is closer to One Meal a Day (OMAD) than 16/8 in terms of hours spent fasting, but the pre-dawn feeding does make this a unique strategy.

[Funes-]

>That leaves a two-hour eating window at night, and a short (let's call it thirty minutes) eating window in the morning.

Could this strategy match any kind of naturally-ocurring pre-historic behavior? It would make sense, at least to me, to constrict one's feeding window like that, since eating would take place for as little time as possible and would be limited to two and a half hours with no activity in between. And I'd guess any kind of activity during the day would need no interruption, as well as large energy reserves.

[thomascgalvin]

Some populations almost certainly ate like this at least some of the time, but it's dangerous to talk too specifically about "what life was like back then." There's just too much variation.

We know that periods of fasting are good for us; even setting this study aside, we know that autophagy is stimulated by fasting. This does tell us that our ancestors fasted often enough that our bodies are designed to benefit from it, but we can't draw more specific conclusions like "we should eat for eight hours a day" or "we should eat every other day."

Also, the fact that modern eating patterns cause disease (which is more or less undisputed) does not mean that our ancestors had a perfect plan that we should follow.