One of the biggest challenges for people on a weight loss diet is picking the right diet. With a plethora of trending diets available online, it is easy to get overwhelmed. Intermittent fasting is one of the most talked-about diet patterns when it comes to weight loss. But is it any better than our traditional diet plans? A recent comprehensive study has looked at this. A new study has compared the benefits of intermittent fasting vs traditional diets apropos weight loss. The findings are published in The BMJ.Global obesity epidemic awaits
Obesity rates are rising across the globe. In 2022, approximately 2.5 billion adults, 43% of the global adult population, were overweight, and about 890 million (16%) lived with obesity, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Overweight and obesity are the major risk factors for a number of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and stroke, which are the leading causes of death worldwide. Losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight can reduce high blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar levels.What is intermittent fasting
Intermittent fasting is favoured by many people who are on a weight loss. This eating pattern cycles between periods of eating and fasting on a regular schedule. Many are replacing traditional calorie-restricted diets, which are unsustainable in the long term, with intermittent diets. There are several types of intermittent fasting, which fall under three broad categories.
- Time-restricted eating: It could be a 16:8 diet, which involves a 16-hour fasting period followed by an 8-hour eating window.
- Alternate day fasting: This method is a 24-hour fast on alternate days
- Whole day fasting: Also known as a 5:2 diet, which means five days of unrestricted eating and two days of fasting.
Health effects of intermittent fasting
As the health effects of intermittent fasting compared with continuous caloric restriction or an unrestricted (ad-libitum) diet remain unclear, the researchers looked into it. They analysed the results of 99 randomised clinical trials involving 6,582 adults (average age 45; 66% female) to compare the effect of intermittent fasting diets with continuous energy restriction or unrestricted diets on body weight and cardiometabolic risk factors.The participants of the study had an average body mass index (BMI) of 31, and almost 90% had existing health conditions. The trial ran for periods between 3-52 weeks (average 12 weeks. They found that all intermittent diets and continuous energy restriction diets resulted in small reductions in body weight when compared with an unrestricted diet. The study showed that alternate-day fasting was the only intermittent fasting diet strategy to show a small benefit in body weight reduction compared with continuous energy restriction (mean difference -1.29 kg). This fasting pattern also showed a small reduction in body weight compared with both time-restricted eating and whole day fasting (mean difference -1.69 kg and -1.05 kg, respectively). However, this difference was not significant, as the clinical threshold is at least 2 kg.
They also found that alternate-day fasting was linked to lower levels of total and โbadโ cholesterol when compared with time-restricted eating. Compared with whole-day fasting, however, time-restricted eating resulted in a small increase in cholesterol levels. There was, however, no benefit when it came to blood sugar or โgoodโ cholesterol levels in any diet strategy comparison.โThe current evidence provides some indication that intermittent fasting diets have similar benefits to continuous energy restriction for weight loss and cardiometabolic risk factors. Longer duration trials are needed to further substantiate these findings,โ the researchers said. โIntermittent fasting does not aim to replace other dietary strategies but to integrate and complement them within a comprehensive, patient-centred nutritional care model,โ they added.
