Fortune cookie science reporting
For science, the appropriate addition is “in mice.”
The Herald’s story (from the Daily Telegraph) “The latest 12 hour diet backed by science” has exactly this problem. It begins
Dieters hoping to shed the kilos should watch the clock as much as their calorie intake after scientists discovered that limiting the time span in which food is consumed can stop weight gain.
Confining meals to a 12-hour period, such as 8am to 8pm, and fasting for the remainder of the day, appears to make a huge difference to whether fat is stored, or burned up by the body.
It’s not until paragraph 6 that we find out this isn’t about dieters, it’s about mice. The differences truly are huge — 5% of body weight within a few days, 25% by the end of the study — so you’d think it would be easy to demonstrate these benefits in humans if they were real.
Earlier this year, a different research group published a summary of studies on time-restricted feeding. There are no controlled studies in humans. The uncontrolled studies aren’t especially high quality, and the ones with a 12-hour period mostly just take advantage of the no-daytime-eating rule observed by Muslims during the month of Ramadan. However, it’s still notable that the average weight reductions from a 4-week period of 12-hour food restrictions were 1-3%.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »