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Is intermittent fasting harmful to your heart? A recent study has stated the popular healthy time-restricted eating is actually linked to a 91 percent increase in the risk of death from heart disease.
The news came from an abstract presented this week at an American Heart Association conference in Chicago. Here’s everything we know about intermittent fasting and its latest study:
What is Intermittent fasting?
Intermittent fasting means that you don’t eat for a period of time each day or week. The most common practice includes 16:8 in which a person fasts for 16 hours and eat during 8 hour period.
What is allowed in intermittent fasting?
No food is allowed during the fasting period, but you can drink water, coffee, tea, and other noncaloric beverages.
Do you lose weight through intermittent fasting?
Several short-term trials have suggested that this eating style can not only lead to some weight loss but may lower blood pressure and improve blood sugar control in certain people.
What does the latest research have to say?
Victor Wenze Zhong, lead author of the new study and an epidemiologist at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China in his new study included more than 20,000 participants from the US who completed two interviews.
During that trial, the participants who limited their eating to eight hours a day had a 91 percent greater chance of dying from cardiovascular disease than those who ate over a 12- to 16-hour time frame, the researchers reported.
However, there were just 414 people in the eight-hour eating group and they tended to be younger and less educated with lower income and less access to food; and were more likely to smoke than the other participants.
The researchers accounted for these factors in their analysis, Dr. Zhong said. However, the study did not show that this style of eating caused deaths from cardiovascular disease, only that the two were linked.
