Is it Time To Quit Intermittent Fasting?
Recent research casts doubt on the popular time-restricted diet, should you resurrect breakfast?
In the US, intermittent fasting (IF) was the most popular diet of 2020 nudging ‘clean eating’ from the title and just managing to fend off keto. Time-restricted eating—the research name for intermittent fasting—is immensely popular worldwide because it’s easy to follow, and there are loads of research. Benefits of the diet include cancer-fighting, improved immune function, better cognition, and fat loss.
I practice the 16:8 version, use it to great effect with clients and have written about it. But, recent research may have thrown a spanner into the works. Read on to discover if it’s time to bring breakfast back to life.
The Spanner
The troublesome research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), set out to discover ‘the effect of time-restricted eating on weight loss and metabolic health in patients with overweight and obesity.’. It’s a decent-sized randomized control trial, with 116 humans split into groups for the 12-week duration.
The most interesting group is the time-restricted eating (TRE) group who were instructed to eat only in an 8-hour window each day. For comparison…
