I think that is the key phrase here … some types of “ingestion control” (to use a general term for all this) are more aligned to certain personal structures … and hence work better …
so - in short - more options are good
Then why is the first meal of the day universally called a nickname for “break the fast”?
I hate being a “well, actually” guy, but well, actually, it’s not. Not universally, anyway. In French, it’s called “little lunch” (petit-déjeuner).
And what do you suppose déjeuner actually means. Hint: jeune is that French word for (a) fast.
And dé means “un.” So, to “unfast” or “break fast.” Ya know, I never noticed that before.
I assumed the original comment was just speaking about English, though. It doesn’t work in (I assume a lot of) other languages. Like in Hungarian, it’s reggeli, which derives from the word for “morning.” In German, it’s Frühstück, meaning “early piece/bite.” It works in Spanish, with desayuno.
The AAP’s newly announced guidelines do not refer to “calorie counting”, but certainly a proper diet is still an important part of recommended treatment for pediatric obesity (despite overriding media attention to drug therapy and bariatric surgery components). It’s now referred to as as dietary and nutritional counseling.*
*Terminology gets a lot of attention in the new AAP guidelines. Pediatricians must no longer refer to “obese children” or “overweight adolescents” - stigmatizing terms. The preferred phrase is “healthy weight” or if you must, “children with obesity” or “adolescents with overweight”. And that’s if you’re permitted to address it as a problem in the first place. There recently was an
op-ed in the N.Y. Times denouncing medical efforts to combat pediatric obesity as a health problem in the first place, claiming the real issue is “anti-fat bias” (and most responding letter writers were supportive).
Given the current sociopolitical climate, I don’t envy pediatricians trying to help kids grow up to avoid the many health issues stemming from markedly excess weight.
Yes. A proper diet, meaning quality nutritional choices, is clearly part of what is required to both treat and to prevent obesity, in pediatrics and in adults. Along with activity. Getting there, in the contexts of our households and communities, is the tricky part.
And let’s tie this back to what I think we can agree on: IF as a substitute for quality nutritional choices and exercise, is a suboptimal path.
Comparing intermittent fasting to “restricting calories” seems to miss the point, though. i think for most people, the point of intermittent fasting is that it’s easier than restricting calories all day long. Certainly for me, it’s pretty easy to just decide not to eat until supper a few days a week, and it’s also easy to eat enough at supper to get adequate nutrition. It’s much harder too decide how much of that snack is okay.
An added bonus when i was doing it was that i was having trouble with reflux, and my esophagus felt much better on days i was fasting.
(i eat dinner around 7, and often snack between then and going to bed at 11 or 12, so that’s not as small a window as you might think. Also, once i break my fast for the day, i tend to be hungrier, so it was easier to delay eating than to stop eating partway through the day. The latter may be better for you, though.)
Honestly I think you are missing the point: good nutritional choices and movement, be that formal exercise or just by lifestyle, matter. The allure of just keep eating the same shit and living the same lazy way, as long as you do this simple trick that the experts don’t want you to know about … is not a best recipe for good health, even if weight loss results by one mechanism or another.
Reduce calories by counting or by IF, whatever. Health outcomes are still going to be better in whichever of them is making healthy nutrition and activities choices, even if that person loses less weight.
I really don’t think we disagree. It’s good for everyone to make good nutritional choices. Neither reducing total calories directly nor intermittent fasting addresses the nutritional quality of what you continue to eat.
Maybe I missed some subtlety, but I don’t think there’s any reason to expect any diet to outperform a “matched isocalorically” “calorie restricted plan”. For most people who want to lose weight, or reduce body fat, the question is how to minimize the unpleasantness of restricting calories, so they can stick to it. For many (by no means all) people, intermittent fasting is one way to do that.
I certainly endorse everyone eating a variety of nutritious foods, including fruits, vegetables, and enough fat and protein and fiber to maintain good health. I also endorse everyone getting both weight-bearing and cardio exercise, which is part of a healthy lifestyle, and probably matters more to overall health for most of us than body weight.
That being said, I actually think there are two neat tricks that experts were slow to endorse that have helped a lot of people get their weight under control
- reducing sugar and other high-glycemic-index foods
- intermittent fasting
I don’t know how many people they work for, or if those people overlap much. But I know a lot of people who have lost weight with one or the other of those, after wanting to lose weight for a while, and failing at low fat and counting calories.
From the health professional researchers’ POV there was: chronobiology.
As stated in that NYT article
They really did expect to see calories handled differently by time of day. And the possibility that it is true in the case of calorie excess rather than restriction is still an open possibility.
Another research update. Not great support for the concept.
Here’s a link to the abstract. I can’t find the whole study.
https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/20343/presentation/379
And here’s a gift link to another news article about it.
I find it really annoying when studies focus on disease X and not on all-cause mortality, but they did look at cancer deaths, too, and found no benefit in general, and a small increase in mortality among people who already had cancer who ate in a smaller window. (That seems likely because they were too sick to eat more often, but there’s no way to know without seeing the whole study.) So it seems likely there was an increase in all-case mortality, too.
The authors were surprised, and hypothesize it’s because people who ate in a smaller window of time had less muscle mass.
Thank you for being less lazy than I was and getting the abstract. Interestingly they did look at all cause and saw no statistically significant impact.
I’m personally as skeptical of the increased risk from TRE/IF as I am of any benefit. The possibility of confounders seems high to me. Time restricted eating has among its users more than its fair share of people eager to embrace other trending dietary approaches in preference to the boring plant forward and Mediterranean diet styles. I’d strongly suspect it is not harmful or beneficial per se but that it tracks more with the what is being eaten than the when.
For years, the Framingham heart study published a decrease in heart disease among people who ate very little fat, but didn’t publish that the all-cause mortality was the same between the groups. That’s because they left out of all the summaries and conclusions the causes of death that increased : accidents, suicide, and murder.
You know, there might be something to the idea of “fat and happy”. Or, more prosaically, the brain might need a certain amount of dietary fat for optimal function. After a couple of decades, they did find a small mortality benefit, but it was much less than the headlined “reduction in heart disease”.
Source: my father was a doctor who taught metabolism and physiology at Tufts medical school, (and briefly, at the veterinary school, until they found a vet to take over the class) and used to bitch about their misleading presentation of their results at the dinner table.
He also used to rail against the focus in public discourse on dietary cholesterol, saying that you manufacture most of the cholesterol in your blood, and what mattered to that was which fatty acids you consumed, not (except in rare cases) dietary cholesterol. He’s why i avoided trans fats starting in the 80s.
Anyway, this is an interesting study, and probably something you should take note of if you are at elevated risk of heart disease. But if you find it easier to eat responsibly when you restrict the number of meals you eat, and you aren’t at especially high risk of heart disease, i wouldn’t worry until the next several studies are done.
The fact that you are an actuary also speaks to your ability to appreciate the ways in which top lines can misdirect … 
My issue remains with those who approach TRE as that one simple trick thing to do … and there are many of them … and who then otherwise eat crap, and little decent real food.
I’m pretty sure you are right, and eating crap in a narrow window is still eating crap.
Personally, as someone who occasionally indulges in a “lite” form of intermittent fasting, i find it an easy way to eat less and avoid junk food. I’ve never tried an 8 hour “feeding window”, i just occasionally fast until supper time. My meals are more mindful and generally more nutritious than my snacks, and i eat less if i have one large meal than three moderate meals. And it’s just less to think about. My husband is wired differently, and gets better results by eating lots of little mindful snacks all day long. That would drive me nuts. (But what i WANT to eat is THAT!) We’ve both been guided by nutritionists, fwiw.
I agree with you that intermittent fasting has been sold as a panacea, and I’m sure it’s not. But i think it’s a tool that works for some people. A tool to make it easier to eat a healthy diet, that is.
Interesting!
But is it possible, though, that Obesity also has a correlation with cardiovascular death? What makes more sense, to stay Obese because, I might have a heart attack if I try to lose excessive weight? Or to lose the damn weight and protect the heart?
In other words, ya pays yer money and takes yer chances here. IF is not a “simple trick” the way you imply. It is simple, although as everyone eventually learns regardless of the strategy employed losing fat really is simple - that doesn’t make it easy, at least not at first.