By University of Illinois Chicago July 9, 2024
Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago have debunked four myths about intermittent fasting: it does not lead to a poor diet, cause eating disorders, result in excessive loss of lean muscle mass, or affect sex hormones. These conclusions, based on clinical studies, confirm the safety of both alternate-day eating and time-restricted eating methods.
In a recent article, researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago have debunked four common misconceptions regarding the safety of intermittent fasting.
Intermittent fasting has become an increasingly popular way to lose weight without counting calories. And a large body of research has shown it’s safe. Still, several myths about fasting have gained traction among clinicians, journalists and the general public: that fasting can lead to a poor diet or loss of lean muscle mass, cause eating disorders, or decrease sex hormones.
In a new commentary in Nature Reviews Endocrinology, UIC researchers debunk each of these. They base their conclusions on clinical studies, some of which they conducted and some done by others.
“I’ve been studying intermittent fasting for 20 years, and I’m constantly asked if the diets are safe,” said lead author Krista Varady, professor of kinesiology and nutrition at UIC. “There is a lot of misinformation out there. However, those ideas are not based on science; they’re just based on personal opinion.”
There are two main types of intermittent fasting. With alternate-day eating, people alternate between days of eating a very small number of calories and days of eating what they want. With time-restricted eating, people eat what they want during a four- to 10-hour window each day, then don’t eat during the rest of the day. The researchers conclude both types are safe despite the popular myths.
Here’s a look at their conclusions:
Intermittent fasting does not lead to a poor diet: The researchers point to studies showing the intake of sugar, saturated fat, cholesterol, fiber, sodium, and caffeine do not change during fasting compared with before a fast. And the percentage of energy consumed in carbohydrates, protein, and fat doesn't change, either.
Intermittent fasting does not cause eating disorders: None of the studies show that fasting caused participants to develop an eating disorder. However, all the studies screened out participants who had a history of eating disorders, and the researchers say that those with a history of eating disorders should not try intermittent fasting. They also urge pediatricians to be cautious when monitoring obese adolescents if they start fasting, because this group has a high risk of developing eating disorders.
Intermittent fasting does not cause excessive loss of lean muscle mass: The studies show that people lose the same amount of lean muscle mass whether they're losing weight by fasting or with a different diet. In both cases, resistance training and increased protein intake can counteract the loss of lean muscle.
Intermittent fasting does not affect sex hormones: Despite concerns about fertility and libido, neither estrogen, testosterone nor other related hormones are affected by fasting, the researchers said.
Reference: “Debunking the myths of intermittent fasting” by Krista A. Varady, Shuhao Lin, Vanessa M. Oddo and Sofia Cienfuegos, 19 June 2024, Nature Reviews Endocrinology. DOI: 10.1038/s41574-024-01009-4
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday July 11 2024, @02:17PM (12 children)
Welcome to the new world where people can no longer distinguish fact from fiction, or reality from fantasy.
If you think public education is too expensive (eg, property taxes, etc) then try ignorance! But here we are actually trying that.
What will happen when the number of people who believe disinformation regularly exceeds those who can recognize it?
Stop asking "How stupid can you be?" Some people apparently take it as a challenge.
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 11 2024, @03:27PM (8 children)
> here we are actually trying that.
It was not so very long ago that most of the population still operated from ignorance. What passed for education was a one-room school for K-12 that over half the local population abandoned by the time they were half way through the program.
The post WWII boomers were the first generation to really get serious about educating virtually everyone, at least until age 18. They were the first generation that mostly attended post-secondary and mostly got some kind of post secondary degree.
And where did this get us? Draft cards being burned, free love, deeper abandonment of the Church... now we've got more pedophiles than we have preachers! Let's go back Again to a mostly uneducated populace, it was a Great time for the people on top of American society!
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Touché) by DannyB on Thursday July 11 2024, @04:14PM (4 children)
And where did this get us? To the moon and back. To understanding more of the teeniest parts of the universe. To living longer and more comfortable lives than anyone ever in history. Children now routinely live to be ten years of age. The blessings of social medi.... er, uh ... nevermind.
As for draft cards being burned, I was only a child at the time, but you can't fight a "war" (or "police action") that is killing large numbers of young men and the populace doesn't see that cost on humans lives as justified. It could be justified if we were fighting for our right to exist. And the fact that if you're old enough to fight and die in a war, you certainly are old enough to vote, smoke, drink, and make your own decisions about your body and who you want to share it with.
As for education causing abandonment of the church, and I do have religious beliefs, I would suggest that maybe organized religion is wrong about some things, similar to the huge controversy over the heliocentric vs geocentric view of the universe.
As for human failings, child molesting ministers/priests, and free love, humans with education are no different than humans at any other time in history. We all have the same basic instincts, and a certain amount of self control over those.
I do understand that a disturbing portion of the American population would be happy to do away with education and go back to ignorance and create a modern version of the handmaid's tail. And it very well may actually happen.
Stop asking "How stupid can you be?" Some people apparently take it as a challenge.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 11 2024, @04:43PM (2 children)
>And it very well may actually happen.
Which is why those who don't want that future need to vote.
With stories of AI powered ammunition vending machines and Clarence Thomas' free trips to Russia, as well as the tsunami of southern border crossers and the atrocities they commit and are committed against them obviously stoking outrage on both sides, it's hard to know how much the 'news' is outright fabricated just to attempt to influence voter behavior.
Meanwhile, one researcher shares their findings re: intermittent fasting. Is it a conclusive case closed dissertation on the topic? Certainly not, but it is a data point worth considering.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 12 2024, @02:32PM (1 child)
If they would make AI powered ammunition capable of being swallowed, you could smuggle it past the TSA gropers and then retrieve it at your destination. If it is unused then on your return trip home you could swallow it again. This might be incentive to make sure you don't have any unused ammunition upon return from a vacation or business trip.
Stop asking "How stupid can you be?" Some people apparently take it as a challenge.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 12 2024, @05:56PM
Taking a science fiction turn, I am a big fan of the "ice bullets" concept... it seems almost feasible, probably is with a focused and modestly funded development program - and would be such a horrible thing for murder investigations that I suspect mere knowledge of how to construct an ice bullet weapon would lead to presumption of guilt in all kinds of unsolved cases...
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 12 2024, @12:36AM
> you can't fight a "war" (or "police action") that is killing large numbers of young men and the populace doesn't see that cost on humans lives as justified.
Oh, "they" could, and did, hundreds of times over centuries, but televised coverage in-theater in Vietnam did more to educate the populace than any amount of university studies ever would. Effectively it converted our society from one which tolerated military conscription to one that does not.
On the other hand, if I were king, one of my first moves (besides leaving pretty much everything the hell alone) would be to re-institute mandatory public service for all young people either upon graduation of high school for 12 months, or upon turning 18 for 24 months - if they're not on track to get a high school diploma or equivalent. This public service could be in the military, and would include overseas deployment, or - at the conscript's discretion - they could also choose to "serve" in local hospitals or other service jobs which would expose them to a broad cross section of society. This is education without books, real world experience in how the real world actually lives.
I think one of the most subversive long-plays of the conservatives recently is their promotion of home schooling. Young adults who enter university (such as where my father teaches) are very different when they have been homeschooled - very narrow minded, rigid, unaccepting and uncomprehending of others' viewpoints. Most of them "grow out" of their pigeonholed perspectives in a couple of years, but some of them simply drop out of school to go back and live under their comfortable rock of faith and what their mammy taught 'em.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Friday July 12 2024, @03:13AM (2 children)
Jerry Pournelle liked to point out, correctly, that the study material presented in grade school primers from 100 years ago exceeds the educational capacity of today's average college students. 4th graders learned algebra, Latin, classics, advanced grammatical concepts, history, civics (there's a lost subject)...
Don't mistake faster communication for less ignorance, or think that just because they didn't have today's science, they were morons. The idea that the past was "ignorant" is a bit off-base. Know what was the primary entertainment a hundred years back? Reading. Used to be you subscribed to Country Life or some other weighty monthly (which could run to 400 pages), and read it cover to cover, because that was what you had (and then discussed it at the pub). And that was what common folks did for entertainment.
Take a look at the writing style of the 1800s monthlies; it often rivaled Britannica. Compare the complexity of The Scarlet Letter, which used to be mandated 7th grade reading, to what kids consume today.
We've degraded to the point that we no longer know what we've lost.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 12 2024, @12:11PM (1 child)
>4th graders learned algebra, Latin, classics, advanced grammatical concepts, history, civics (there's a lost subject)...
4th graders where? Certainly not south of the Mason Dixon line. Travel was slow and expensive in 1924, the majority of people stayed put. Even in the 1970s there were holdovers of this behavior: 20 year olds who had never been more than 50 miles from the place they were born, of the 1200 kids in my high school (in Bradenton, Florida) over 100 were that poorly traveled. I was told by several of them how brave I was going all the way to Miami for college.
>The idea that the past was "ignorant" is a bit off-base.
There were bright spots of bright people, certainly the privileged of Europe and some parts of the U.S. who took an interest could learn quite a bit from their Universities, but even there in 1924 - what percentage of the population actually did that? And back then, as now, majority rules - you just need 50% of the vote to get elected.
> Know what was the primary entertainment a hundred years back? Reading.
Depending on who you ask: today, there are 45 million adults in the United States alone who cannot read, 21%. https://www.lucyproject.org/why-literacy [lucyproject.org] The official government figures apparently have a different threshold for literacy: https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp [ed.gov] but they do tell a story of improving literacy over time.
When I said "not so long ago" I was more thinking in the 150-200 year timeframe, in that timeframe I would wager that less than half of the voting US population read for primary entertainment.
>Compare the complexity of The Scarlet Letter, which used to be mandated 7th grade reading, to what kids consume today.
Mandated where / when? Certainly not rural Mississippi anytime ever. My 7th grade 1978 Catholic school English teacher also didn't go that deep into anything, likely because it was far over her head. Most public middle schools I have been exposed to in my lifetime are more daycare than education, barely keeping a lid on the behavior issues. I will agree, all attention spans have gone to shit since the advent of television, accelerated downhill with 100+ channels of cable and wireless remotes for surfing, hit rock bottom but continue to dig with the advent of YouTube, TikTok et. al.
>We've degraded to the point that we no longer know what we've lost.
I don't think it's so much that we've degraded, I just think we've got better insight into our fellow citizens than ever before. If you went to a good college, you probably think "most people" are like those you went to college with. You all got similar jobs, your jobs usually isolate you to an extent from people of different backgrounds, you spend most of your days with "people like you" and that's your perspective on the state of things. Now, with social media, you get to see that a lot of the world really is like Marjorie Taylor Green, and a majority 'like her style' well enough to vote for her.
The bright spots still exist, bigger and brighter than ever, but there are also more ignorant people than ever before - the question is one of percentages.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 12 2024, @01:58PM
That's just to be literate in the language...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 11 2024, @05:39PM (2 children)
Is public education too expensive? Let me ponder that, for a moment.
Born in 1956, my mama taught me the ABCs at home, taught me to count to 100, taught me to write my name, address, telephone number, taught me how to color inside the lines, and a lot more. At 5 years of age, I went for pre-registration at the local elementary school, and recited everything that the examiners wanted to hear, demonstrated my ability to write, and performed various other little tasks to demonstrate my readiness for school. I then completed school in 12 years.
Today, children are sent to day care, preschool, kindergarten, then first grade, which lengthens their education by 3 years, or more. What, exactly, do today's students have to show for all that extra expenditure for their "education"? Before you resond to that, you need to take the literacy rate into account. An amazing number of high school grads are unable to read above a 6th grade level.
Throwing money at education has solved nothing.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Friday July 12 2024, @02:37PM (1 child)
That is an admiral job your mamma did. Seriously. I am going to venture a guess that maybe she did not have to also work out of the home for food, shelter, clothing, xbox and other essential necessities of life.
Men did the work and women stayed at home pregnant as God intended.
Stop asking "How stupid can you be?" Some people apparently take it as a challenge.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 13 2024, @01:28AM
Well, yes, and you have segued into another serious discussion. Progressives are so very proud of their various "feminist" movements and goals - but they never consider at what cost those "gains" come. As my previous post may have suggested, woman turn over much of the nurturing task to strangers, who may or may not care about their children. 60 years ago, the 'man of the house' literally 'brought home the bacon', on his own income. Today, with two working adults in the home, many simply can't make ends meet. I've keyed on Obama's speech in the past, where he outright told American women that he didn't want them staying at home, he wanted them in the work force. There are several ways in which the 'quality of life' in the United States has deteriorated since the 1950s. But, conservatives won't take a very hard look at them, and progressives outright deny and deterioration.
Children need a father figure, and a mother figure in their lives. One or both of those figures needs to be intimately involved in their children's development. Today's society deprives many children of a father figure completely, and deprives many more children of a central nurturing figure as well.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stratified cake on Thursday July 11 2024, @02:27PM (1 child)
Yes, theories change and new discoveries invalidate old "truths". That's science.
But if every few years true and false switch sides, a few years later they switch back and you can watch this process over and over again; that's simply fashion.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday July 11 2024, @05:24PM
I mean there is such a thing as evidence-based-nutrition. It tends to boil down pretty soon to "Don't eat so much meat, carbs, fats, eat more vegetables, especially leafy vegetables" offered as advice in specific forms designed to get people to actually do it.
That never makes news because A. it's obvious, and B. it's not easy, and C. it's not very "fun"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 11 2024, @03:17PM (7 children)
I found that intermittent fasting made me more prone to binge eating. My window would open, and I'd devour my pantry like a horde of locusts. Anecdotes are not data though, and in no universe can I say that I'm healthier now (+50 pounds) than I was when I when intermittently fasting 18/6 or 20/4.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 11 2024, @03:36PM
The difference between self-assigned intermittent fasting and actual paleolithic era intermittent fasting is that in the paleolithic, you didn't have a refrigerator full of ready-to-eat snacks just seconds away from enjoyment on your tongue - moments from a high-fat high-sugar rush in the bloodstream.
Even 50 years ago, work was work, you brought a simple lunch that you ate halfway through and the rest of the time you were simply denied food. When you arrived home there may have been some ice cream in the freezer, a bag of potato chips to binge on if you were so inclined, but mostly you worked to prepare a single evening meal. Today, a lot of work includes a daily hour of grazing competitively prepared tempting lunch fare, high in salt, high in calories because: you can afford it and you wouldn't want to be left behind when the lunch train heads out, would you? Much more "fast food" is on offer on the way home, and more than half of what's for sale in the grocery stores is "ready to eat" with little or no preparation. It's all there with virtually zero resistance, ultra cheap - but instead of paying the grocer for good quality nutrition that we work to prepare, today we get the food cheap and easy and pay the medical system to treat our conditions related to obesity.
If you think back to the paleolithic, and the billions of years before that that we evolved from, a fast was broken not so much when a smartwatch countdown timer finally hit zero, but when the next meal became available through situations somewhat outside the individual's control. Longer fasts were enforced by circumstances, not willpower. Freely available food is certainly preferable to starving, but it's not how we evolved.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeRandomGeek on Thursday July 11 2024, @04:03PM
14/10 works great for me, in combination with other things. But there are so many confounding factors that it is hard to say what effect is caused by any one of them. If you're getting hungry while trying to lose weight, the place to start is eating more high fiber foods and less foods with a high glycemic index.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stormreaver on Thursday July 11 2024, @04:08PM (2 children)
During the first year of the pandemic, after they sent us home to work, I lost 40 pounds via intermittent fasting, and my blood pressure decreased dramatically, due to a greatly increased sense of connection with my family. During the second year, while still working 100% from home, I maintained that loss with only minor deviations up and down (I'd say plus or minus a pound).
There was a major software transition upstream that caused me to work over a hundred hours of overtime during a two-month period. My weight stayed within that same range, even though I was working harder than ever under a near-impossible time constraint. I pulled off a huge feat that would have been impossible to do in the corporate office. Through it all, my eating was intermittent and my weight and blood pressure were stable.
Then we got the news that we were required to come into the office one day a week. My blood pressure rose almost immediately, and my weight started to climb over the next few weeks. My intermittent fasting window got larger and larger until I could no longer maintain the habit. I've gained back 20 pounds due to having to go back into the office. Intermittent fasting is fine, but the office is a killer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 11 2024, @07:26PM
It sounds like we might have a common factor. Stress also broke my IF regimen. For me it was a few months providing hospice care for my mother. It's hard not to eat when your key distractor is watching a parent wither.
I could find data to support the statement "I use food as an emotional crutch." :/
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday July 12 2024, @02:53PM
Could it be that, while working at home, you regularly got up and moved around?
JoeMerchant above made a commentary about the paleolithic. What he didn't mention, though, is that people in the paleolithic were moving a lot more than us, chair potatoes.
It is funny, or tragic, how you get to hear from all sides that you have bad eating habits and lack of self-control, but somehow the radical break between factory/agricultural work and office sitting is never mentioned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Thursday July 11 2024, @05:33PM (1 child)
That happens, although if you fast through the first two meals of the day, by the time dinner comes around the stomach has shrunk and you probably aren't able to over eat by so much as to offset the previous meals. It's somewhat less than ideal to binge after skipping meals, but to an extent the human body evolved in a situation where that was a real thing that might have to happen regularly.
Also, that's not a problem with intermittent fasting, you were probably not doing it correctly. You're supposed to have something like coconut oil right before you start the fast to help maintain your blood sugar. And if you're hitting the beginning of the window and devouring everything in site, it's worth having a snack ready right when you hit that time and then wait another 15-30 minutes before having a proper meal in order for your blood sugar to stabilize.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday July 12 2024, @03:22AM
I know someone who uses butter in coffee as her IF start and stop meal. She does 2 or 3 days at a time, then one large meal. Took off and kept off 150 pounds, and got rid of the HBP and oncoming Type II.
If better habits don't work, get a thyroid workup. Even approaching borderline can make weight creep up and impossible to lose.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jman on Friday July 12 2024, @01:29PM
Problem was, the rest of the base was just having their first meal of the day, so the cooks only made eggs, bacon, coffee and toast.
I got to thinking about the word "breakfast".
Literally speaking, every time one eats, they are breaking their fast from the last time they ate.
These days I call all meals "breakfast".