Time-Restricted Eating Shows No Weight Loss Benefit in RCT
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The popular new weight-loss approach of eating within a restricted window of time during the day, allowing for an extended period of fasting — also known as intermittent fasting — does not result in greater weight loss compared with nonrestricted meal timing, results from a randomized clinical trial show.
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@palak The study, published online in JAMA Internal Medicine by Dylan A. Lowe, PhD, also of UCSF, involved 116 participants who were randomized to a 12-week regimen of either three structured meals per day or time-restricted eating, with instructions to eat only between 12:00 pm and 8:00 pm and to completely abstain from eating at other times. The participants were not given any specific instructions regarding caloric or macronutrient intake "so as to offer a simple, real-world recommendation to free-living individuals," the authors write. Although some prior research has shown improvements in measures such as glucose tolerance with time-restricted eating, studies showing weight loss with the approach, including one recently reported by Medscape Medical News, have been small and lacked control groups.