O, Veni! A study says intermittent fasting is making people drop dead. Oh, come on
Actually I don’t think that journalist captures the biggest flaw of all, which is the sample size. 20,000 people sounds kind of big, but it’s actually tiny. The problem is that the average age of the population was 49. Heart attacks among people below old age are relatively rare to begin with, and when you are sorting out people who self-report eating on a time-restricted schedule your numbers are going to be minuscule. “91%” is the relative risk, but I don’t see where they report the absolute risk or the absolute numbers. My guess is that a couple instances could be driving that seemingly large figure. Relative risk is meaningless in almost any context (of data reporting) without also understanding absolute risk.
Larger sample size would merely increase confidence in the misleading association. • Wearing body armor linked to ER visits for gunshot wounds! • Nicotine replacement therapy users 70% more likely to get lung cancer! • Parachute owners die of massive impact trauma 10× as often!
> Based on an abstract of the new study provided to me by the American Heart Association [...] the researchers did not ask people if they were following time-restricted diets. What they did was look for people who only ate for a short period of time during the day based on two reports to the survey of what they ate. Yeah, that seems like a caveat that deserves more attention.