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Very dubious. Unfortunately there isn't a paper, this is being presented at a conference, so it's difficult to critique it. There was a similar study though published back in 2022: "Meal Skipping and Shorter Meal Intervals Are Associated with Increased Risk of All-Cause and Cardiovascular Disease Mortality among US Adults" [0]. The problem with that study is easily found in the results section: > As shown in Table 1, compared with participants with three meals per day, participants eating fewer than three meals per day were more likely to be younger, men, non-Hispanic Black, with less education and lower family income, current smokers, heavy alcohol drinkers, higher physical activity levels, lower total energy intake and lower diet quality, food insecure, and higher frequency of snacks. In other words, if you do an observational study you're going to get a lot of people of poor socioeconomic status with unhealthy habits (e.g. smoking) who skip meals. That's a very different population from an average person who starts intermittent fasting as an intervention. Consequently, the results are useless for showing the causal effect of intermittent fasting. That is a different study to the one that's linked, but they both seem to share the exact same methodological shortcomings, so I think both can be equally as readily dismissed. For that matter, they're both studies of a cohort of ~20,000 US adults, so they might actually be using the same dataset. [0]: https://www.jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(22)00874-7/ful... |