This vice article says that they tested 2 groups of overweight people. One group IF’d on an unspecified interval, and one group ate 3 meals a day. What really alarms me is that they’re saying the IF group only lost a couple more pounds on average, and that the pounds lost were all lean muscle mass! Their diets, macronutrient ratios and quantities/calories were not provided in the article. They say in the article that these findings come from a study published in JAMA International Medicine. Can some of you more science savvy fellows help me find this study and interpret the results? I just find it frustrating that these kinds of articles are all over the web, and since they are from “trusted” or “popular” sources like Vice, they can deter misinformed people who might otherwise benefit from IF. Thanks,
Joe
New Vice Article Claims IF is not healthy, even dangerous new fad diet
I’ll let someone else search JAMA for this because it’s probably nonsense and not worth the time. It may likely be talking about OMAD and/or TMAD more than IF. You’d be better informed to read Jason Fung on the topic. All I want to say is that when I was a child in the 50s pretty much everyone finished supper around 6pm and began breakfast the following morning around 7-8am. Without even trying, most folks were doing a 12/12 or 10/14 IF every day. It’s called ‘break fast’ for a reason. I still eat this way because it’s easy peasy. I manage to eat 3 and often 4 meals per day, and still IF between supper and breakfast.
Do tell… You can be sure the food they were eating was still SAD…
One group of ’ healthier ’ people in two groups of unhealthy people, does not equal a group of healthy people…
There is a serious glut of “junk science” out there. Every college kid that needs an extra $20 can write a 500 word article and say just about any ridiculous thing so long as it’s “believable” and it won’t be long before it’s considered to be “fact” by the masses, maybe even end up in the Wikipedia tomes of universal knowledge. It’s just stupid. What used to be reputable medical journals have even gone down the road of publishing stuff that’s not been properly vetted or peer reviewed. Crazy world we’re living in, just crazy… 
I think this is the study being reported on:
https://sci-hub.se/10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.4153
It was a small (105 completed) short (12 weeks) study of overweight and obese patients. The time restricted eating (TRE) group was instructed to eat ad libitum between the hours of 12-8 PM and self reported 83.5% compliance. The control group was instructed to eat 3 structured meals daily and reported 92.1% compliance.
Both groups lost a little weight and the TRE group lost a tiny bit more. The reported downside of the TRE group was a loss of lean mass as measured by DEXA.
I think the results are compromised by relying on self reported compliance without any mechanism to guarantee or even evaluate the accuracy of that important piece of data. They acknowledge the limitation of DEXA scans which report hydration as lean mass. They attempted to minimize this by instructing participants to fast for 12 hours before their scan but they don’t mention any instruction with regards to fluid intake. I could easily imagine the group regularly eating breakfast drinking more fluids on their fasted morning before scanning as a way to mellow the hunger signaling of a skipped expected meal. There were no measurements of strength or physical performance. They also acknowledge other studies show better effects with an earlier time window, ie eat breakfast and skip dinner or at least eat dinner early but they didn’t test that because they thought it would be hard…
I guess my take from it would be that eating crap in a restricted window is no better or worse for you than eating crap 3 times a day.
Unless you want to lose a bit more weight but not much.
Eating ketogenically in a time restricted window seems to have been pretty beneficial in my 120 pound weight loss.
Also keep in mind that the Vice brand is all about being ahead of the game (extreme cutting edge hipster).
If there’s a faint possibility that something popular is dangerous, they want to be all over that and the first ones to shout about it - “see, we knew that it was a bad idea before everybody else!”
Regarding the study itself: “self-reported”.
IF keeps your glucose steady. You don’t want it spiking all day long.
I’m pretty sure sick and unhealthy are synonyms…
I’m a decade younger but we ate like that in the 60’s also. Breakfast rotated between bacon or sausage and eggs, oatmeal or the very occasional cold cereal. My parents were a believer in a “hot breakfast”.
Lunch was cooked at the school, not heated up from Sysco. No snacks. Not at home, either (spoil your dinner). We didn’t eat from 6 pm - 7 am.
I haven’t read all the posts in this thread, but when I saw this study come out a few weeks ago I read through the details. One group was told to eat 3 meals/day (no snacking) and I think they were given some guidance about food (probably not LC/keto but at least some attention to quality) whereas the other group was just told to eat within an 8 hour (?) period.
Personally, if I had heard about the wonders of IF and had terrible eating habits, there’s no telling what I would try to put into my mouth for 8 hours straight 
. In any case, 3 distinct eating windows could well be better for insulin than one long 8-hour stretch.
The other missing piece is that if folks are very overweight, some of the weight loss could come from muscle without serious problems. If it were lean folks losing muscle, that would be more of a concern.
Yes, this is some really ‘bad science’ going on here, if we’re even that kind about it.