Intermittent Fasting May Help Treat Metabolic Syndrome
/The study in cell metabolism finds that restricting eating to a 10-hour period improves a variety of parameters of the metabolic syndrome.
I want you to think about the first calorie you consumed yesterday. Mine was probably the sugar in my coffee around 6 am.
Now think about the last calorie you consumed yesterday. Mine would have been some sugar in my tea around 930 pm.
Most adults in the US are like me – consuming calories over around a 15-hour period.
But if you haven’t been living under a pizza lately, you will have heard of intermittent fasting, a dietary plan that extols the virtue of prolonged fasts to reset the metabolism. The details on any individual plan vary, but the central idea revolves around time restricted eating (TRE) – limiting caloric consumption to specific hours on the clock. And now, thanks to this paper appearing in Cell Metabolism, we have some evidence that a relatively modest time-restricted eating plan can significantly improve blood parameters among individuals with the metabolic syndrome.
This is a small, but nicely done study. 19 individuals with metabolic syndrome who had a daily eating interval of about 15 hours, were followed for 3 months during which they were asked to restrict their eating to a 10-hr window. Think 8am-6pm.
Other than that, there were no particular requirements. Participants could eat whatever they wanted, however much they wanted, provided it was in that timeframe.
Less calories, less weight. Huh.
By and large, this was a compliant bunch, reducing their eating window to just over 10 hours. Detailed dietary profiling found that they weren’t skipping meals, but compressing them – eating breakfast a bit later and dinner a bit earlier.
Lower is better. Like golf and drunken texts to your ex-girlfriend.
And in that process, they ended up taking in fewer calories – about 200 fewer calories a day less than during the baseline period. That reduction in caloric intake led to a fair amount of weight loss, around 7 pounds over the 3 month study.
Several metabolic parameters improved. Body fat and systolic blood pressure decreased. LDL cholesterol went down, and the average participant lost about 4 cm of waist circumference.
But not everything changed so dramatically. Fasting blood sugar and hemoglobin A1c got a bit lower, but not to the point of statistical significance for example.
There were a lot of measurements done in this study, 32 are reported in the outcome table, so we need to be a bit worried about false-positives. But that’s not really the main limitation here.
The main limitation is that these patients were enrolled in a study. See, without a control group, we don’t know if the beneficial changes seen were due to the effects of intermittent fasting, or just because the patients knew they were being “watched”. They had to log into an app, go to study visits, and so on. That alone may be enough to change behaviors in a beneficial direction.
In other words, we don’t have great support here for particularly unique effects of intermittent fasting compared to other diets that lead to calorie restriction.
And this leads to one of my central theories of diet studies. Any diet that makes it harder to eat – whether you are limiting certain types of foods or certain times of day – is probably good for you. One of the central drivers of the obesity epidemic is our ad libitum access to food – we often see promising results like this when you simply limit that free access.
What I like about time-restricted eating is it’s pretty easy to explain. Eat inside these hours, don’t eat outside of these hours. That’s a bit easier than explaining how, for example, ketosis works. But in the end, the key to any diet plan is adherence. Researchers contacted these participants 3 months after the study ended. At that point, only 5 were still adherent to the calorie window.
Future studies examining novel dietary interventions would do well to prove that participants not only understand the diet, but can stick with it.
This commentary first appeared on medscape.com.