Eating nutritious food and maintaining a healthy lifestyle is causing a sudden surge in heart problems, scientists have warned.
According to new research published Monday at the American Heart
Association’s scientific sessions in Chicago, the new trend of
intermittent fasting increases the risk of a person dying from a heart
attack by a whopping 91%.
Researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in
China claim that the dramatic rise in heart conditions over the last few
years is due to increasing numbers of people limiting the amount of
food they eat in order to maintain healthy weights.
Nbcnews.com
reports: The analysis — which has not yet been peer-reviewed or
published in an academic journal — is based on data from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey collected between 2003 and 2018. The researchers
analyzed responses from around 20,000 adults who recorded what they ate
for at least two days, then looked at who had died from cardiovascular
disease after a median follow-upperiod of eight years.
However, Victor Wenze Zhong, a co-author of the analysis, said it’s
too early to make specific recommendations about intermittent fasting
based on his research alone.
“Practicing intermittent fasting for a short period such as 3 months
may likely lead to benefits on reducing weight and improving
cardiometabolic health,” Zhong said via email. But he added that people
“should be extremely cautious” about intermittent fasting for longer
periods of time, such as years.
Intermittent fasting regimens vary widely. A common schedule is to
restrict eating to a period of six to eight hours per day, which can
lead people to consume fewer calories, though some eat the same amount
in a shorter time. Another popular schedule is the “5:2 diet,” which
involves eating 500 to 600 calories on two nonconsecutive days of the
week but eating normally for the other five.
Zhong said it’s not clear why his research found an association
between time-restricted eating and a risk of death from cardiovascular
disease. He offered an observation, though: People who limited their
eating to fewer than eight hours per day had less lean muscle mass than
those who ate for 12 to 16 hours. Low lean muscle mass has been linked
to a higher risk of cardiovascular death.
Cardiovascular and nutrition experts who were not involved in the
analysis offered several theories about what might explain the results.
Dr. Benjamin Horne, a research professor at Intermountain Health in
Salt Lake City, said fasting can increase stress hormones such as
cortisol and adrenaline, since the body doesn’t know when to expect food
next and goes into survival mode. That added stress may raise the
short-term risk of heart problems among vulnerable groups, he said,
particularly elderly people or those with chronic health conditions.
Horne’s research has
shown that fasting twice a week for four weeks, then once a week for 22
weeks may increase a person’s risk of dying after one year but decrease
their 10-year risk of chronic disease.
“In the long term, what it does is reduces those risk factors for
heart disease and reduces the risk factors for diabetes and so forth —
but in the short term, while you’re actually doing it, your body is in a
state where it’s at a higher risk of having problems,” he said.
Even so, Horne added, the analysis “doesn’t change my perspective
that there are definite benefits from fasting, but it’s a cautionary
tale that we need to be aware that there are definite, potentially
major, adverse effects.”
Intermittent fasting gained popularity about a decade ago, when the
5:2 diet was touted as a weight loss strategy in the U.K. In the years
to follow, several celebrities espoused the benefits of
an eight-hour eating window for weight loss, while some Silicon Valley
tech workers believed that extreme periods of fasting boosted productivity. Some studies have also suggested that intermittent fasting might help extend people’s lifespans by warding off disease.
However, a lot of early research on intermittent fasting involved
animals. In the last seven years or so, various clinical trials have
investigated potential benefits for humans, including for heart health.
“The purpose of intermittent fasting is to cut calories, lose
weight,” said Penny Kris-Etherton, emeritus professor of nutritional
sciences at Penn State University and a member of the American Heart
Association nutrition committee. “It’s really how intermittent fasting
is implemented that’s going to explain a lot of the benefits or adverse
associations.”
Dr. Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, a cardiologist at Mayo Clinic, said the
timing of when people eat may influence the effects they see.
“I haven’t met a single person or patient that has been practicing
intermittent fasting by skipping dinner,” he said, noting that people
more often skip breakfast, a schedule associated with an increased risk of heart disease and death.
The new research comes with limitations: It relies on people’s
memories of what they consumed over a 24-hour period and doesn’t
consider the nutritional quality of the food they ate or how many
calories they consumed during an eating window.
So some experts found the analysis too narrow.
“It’s a retrospective study looking at two days’ worth of data, and
drawing some very big conclusions from a very limited snapshot into a
person’s lifestyle habits,” said Dr. Pam Taub, a cardiologist at UC San
Diego Health.
Taub said her patients have seen “incredible benefits” from fasting regimens.
“I would continue doing it,” she said. “For people that do
intermittent fasting, their individual results speak for themselves.
Most people that do intermittent fasting, the reason they continue it is
they see a decrease in their weight. They see a decrease in blood
pressure. They see an improvement in their LDL cholesterol.”
Kris-Etherton, however, urged caution: “Maybe consider a pause in
intermittent fasting until we have more information or until the results
of the study can be better explained,” she said.
(Article by Sean Adl-Tabatabai republished from ThePeoplesVoice.tv)
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Planet Today
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