The AHA Released an April Fool's Joke a Tad Early by Claiming that IF Raises Your Risk of Death by 91%

Now they're claiming it's not a joke. Not sure I believe them. Remember that gubmit food pyramid that was turned upside down to see if you were paying attention? Now retracted.

While writing this post, I thought I was REAL MAD at the stupidity masquerading as science. But then I found it hard to keep a straight face as I was typing. My family asked me what I was writing about, and when I told them that a new study claims that intermittent fasting increases your rate of death by 91%, we all burst out laughing and couldn’t stop for several minutes.

I mean, come on guys, couldn’t you have made it sound more plausible and went with, say, 35% increased risk of death? That’s still enough to scare people. Did you have to go all 91% on us?

We have the most obese nation on earth, with 80% of the population overweight, all chronic illnesses are on the rise, and there’s never been a time in the history of the world when less physical activity was required of us—less walking to the market, less chopping wood, less carrying water from a spring.

And there’s never been a time in history when people had access to more food in their pantries, and fridges, and freezers, and in that other freezer, and in the fridge in the garage that’s bursting with soda. And yet, the main message that came out of the American Heart Association’s (AHA) annual meeting this year is that Americans aren’t eating often enough???

Get this—they want us to eat for SIXTEEN hours per day. Just take a stroll around Walmart and you’ll see what they mean. All those people fasting in there—they need to be made to EAT. MORE. OFTEN. Sixteen hours a day, people. This means the second your feet hit the floor until just before you hop into bed: EAT, EAT, EAT.

And especially if Americans want to avoid heart disease, the AMA tells us, they need to eat more often. You should probably put cereal next to your bed so you can start eating BEFORE your feet hit the floor, maybe even in the middle of the night.

All these researchers have been sitting around puzzling their pretty little heads about the cause of the obesity epidemic which is leading to skyrocketing heart disease and the recent uptick in heart attacks among the young—and the AMA has found the cause. It’s this darned fasting fad. It must be. Science^TM said so.

You can’t make this stuff up! If you worked for a parody website like The Babylon Bee and you submitted the spoof headline: “American Heart Association warns that Americans need to eat more often to avoid death,” they probably wouldn’t run it because it sounds too preposterous to even be funny.

But when you run it as a serious headline—now that’s funny!

I’m trying to imagine the reaction of all the big wigs sitting in the audience as the AHA announced its headline. Did they all sit there and fake serious faces? I wonder if there were a few honest people in there who had a hard time keeping a straight face.

I mean, I know that the entire get-up is sponsored by big food and big pharma corporations, but perhaps the overlords allow slight smirks; maybe not. It must be a hard-knock life to be bought out and to have to come home and tell your family with a straight face about the latest findings, that if they don’t eat around the clock for even TWO DAYS, they’re going to DIE.

And while we’re eating around the clock, what exactly should we be eating? Well, the AHA has put its cute little heart check seal on the things it approves as heart healthy:

A Serious Evaluation of The Science^TM

First a few facts about the study:

• The study asked participants about their eating habits for—not the last year, not the last 5 years—the last TWO DAYS. If someone had been drinking all weekend and slept until noon, they would be included in the 8-hour eating window group.

• When this study began in 2003, very few people knew about intermittent fasting. This means that only 2% of the people studied were put into the unevenly sized 16-hour group. A whopping 59% were placed in the 12-16 hour eating window. This uneven distribution allowed for some fancy statistical manipulation.

• Although 20,000 people were followed, the increased risk of death was based on 0.15% of participants. In other words, those who died from cardiovascular disease and also claimed they had eaten within an 8-hour window counted for a mere 31 deaths. One thing that true science needs to control for is those who are eating that way as a “hail Mary”—already ill and trying to fix it at the last minute, not mention shift workers, drug addicts, and alcoholics, none of whom are known for eating three square meals a day. We just don’t know because observational studies are such an imprecise tool.

I always try to be fair in everything I write, assume the best of others, and approach a topic from all sides. But this week I decided that the time for pulling punches is past.

The powers that be deserve a much bigger whupping than any miffed housewife typing in northern Idaho could ever deliver. They have earned every last accusation I’m about to deliver and then some. Hold on tight—I’m about to get fierce.

But first, one more laugh. This was my favorite comment on X:

Peace out, Sam Guy! I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Okay, time to be serious for real.

What evidence do I have that you should not allow even the slightest shadow of a doubt to linger in your mind for even one second that this study says anything meaningful?

I’m glad you asked! I have quite a bit.

Let’s start by looking at the title of the study.

Association of 8-Hour Time-Restricted Eating with All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality

Let’s take a moment and talk about that very first word ASSOCIATION. Do we really know what that word means? In science, an association (aka correlation) is the opposite of a causation. There may be an association between people who wear white tennis shoes and the likelihood of getting hit in a crosswalk.

If this association were true, would it prove that wearing white tennis shoes makes you more likely to get hit? Should you forbid your children from wearing white tennis shoes because they might get hit? Or, is there another explanation? Perhaps people who live in crowded urban areas are both more likely to get hit and are also more likely to wear white tennis shoes. The connection may be circumstantial.

Do you know what we call a person who tries to claim causation from a correlation study? We call them superstitious. Not wearing white tennis shoes because of an association between white tennis shoes and getting hit by a car is pure superstition because it’s assuming causation when only correlation is proved. The common person is sometimes superstitious. I forgive him. Scientists must not make such careless mistakes.

Do you know what we call scientists who take epidemiological correlation studies and infer causation? We call them LIARS. They are completely, 100% deserving of the term because they know full well that they are deceiving the public. Every last science class in every last school in the country teaches that an epidemiological study CANNOT, by design, EVER prove causation.

Epidemiology is how you get junk science like this:

The entire scientific community agrees on the lack of reliability of observational studies. In order for a study to show causation, it needs to be a different kind of study, such as a clinical trial. The only purpose of any observational study ever serves is to GENERATE A HYPOTHESIS. (Sorry for yelling so much today; I don’t usually do that.)

This means that for scientists to take the results of an observational study and imply causation is the same thing as if you took the hypothesis of your science fair project, before you tested said hypothesis, and published it in major news media outlets as if it told the world a single thing. Are you kidding me?

Even though an epidemiological study can never, ever, ever prove causation, there are times when such a study can have value in making scientists want to do further research.

For instance, the correlation between smoking and lung cancer is between 15 and 30 times depending on the study. To put this in parallel language to the above AHA’s study, it would be stated as, “Those who smoke were between 1500 and 3000 times more likely to get lung cancer than those who didn’t smoke.” Those numbers are so compelling that they cause one to pay attention despite the fact that as an epidemiological study, it’s the lowest quality of evidence.

But there’s a sleight-of-hand that the AHA made that allows me in good conscience to call them liars. I take slander seriously and do not use the label lightly. I feel confident using it in this situation because the organization knows full well that its language is deceptive.

Although the title of the original study begins with the word association, notice the write-up on the AHA’s website about the study:

8-hour time-restricted eating linked to a 91% higher risk of cardiovascular death

“Linked” is a somewhat ambiguous word. I could say: wearing white tennis shoes is linked to a 200% chance of being run over by a car. But then when we get into the details of the study, the real deception begins.

A study of over 20,000 adults found that those who followed an 8-hour time-restricted eating schedule, a type of intermittent fasting, had a 91% higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

That language is completely unscientific in keeping with the design of the study. You are not at an increased risk of getting hit in a crosswalk if you wear white tennis shoes. You are not at an increased risk of dying if you practice IF. That is simply not what the study is able to claim in any, way, shape, or form.

Let me give you a couple of real-world examples based on actual data. Notice below the correlation between breast cancer deaths and internet use.

Can this correlation claim that using the internet puts you at increased risk for death by breast cancer? To imply this is simply ridiculous. What’s even more ridiculous is to run a slew of headlines in mainstream media announcing the results of your hypothesis-generating observational study.

It’s easy to account for such an association. Breast cancer deaths are rising for whatever reason. Internet users also happen to be rising. The link may well be living in the 21st century. Perhaps breast cancer deaths are rising due to highly processed food consumption, eating around the clock, increased exposure to toxins, etc. I don’t know the cause. I just know the above observational studies cannot prove an increased risk from internet use.

Here’s another true example. Notice below that the divorce rates are going down in Maine at the exact same rate that margarine use is going down. Does this association prove that those who stop using margarine are less likely to get divorced?

Everyone knows I’m no advocate for consuming margarine. It’s never been allowed in my house, never will. However, I’m not going to stoop so low as to use the above epidemiological data to try to manipulate people into not using margarine by implying that if they do stop using it, their likelihood of divorce will go down. The two are correlated. You can imply NO causation from this study whatsoever. This type of observational study is not capable of showing causation because of how it was designed.

But why is there even an association between a higher risk of death and an 8-hour eating window?

Since the authors of the study only released the abstract and not their methods for us to examine (how convenient of them), we are left guessing what maneuvers they pulled to get their desired outcome. Here are a few guesses.

Remember, the “researchers” (I’m choking at calling them that) asked the participants how they had eaten over the last TWO days. Let’s say that some of the people were asked on Monday about how many meals they ate on Saturday and Sunday. This section of the study took place in 2003, long before IF had a tenth of the attention it has today. This means that the likelihood that there were any people practicing IF for health—as in doing the clean fast, eating more protein, cutting seed oils—is extremely low. Perhaps one in a hundred people at that time knew about true fasting and were actively practicing it. This was the time when people who were trying to be healthy, who exercised and got enough sleep, and who lived stable lives were faithfully eating three meals a day just like Wheaties told them to. What population, then, would eat two meals a day?

People who stayed out and partied all night and didn’t wake up until noon would be eating two meals. Alcoholics and drug addicts don’t eat at all some days. There’s also a category of people who never eat at home. They can’t be bothered to make themselves coffee, eggs, or anything. This person will wait to eat until they have it together enough to go through a drive-through. There are people who stay up until 3 am with the guys playing video games and never eat breakfast. There are business executives who live stressful lives and can’t be bothered with food in the morning.

There are many unhealthy reasons to skip a meal. And since I can’t see the details of the study, I’m left guessing. Notice that the study says “eating” and not “eating and drinking.” There’s no mention of a clean fast (a term that didn’t exist in 2003) so participants were likely chugging sodas, beer, dessert coffees well outside the 8-hour eating window.

When you do a science fair project, you have to come up with a hypothesis that is actually compelling. If your hypothesis isn’t compelling, your 4th-grade teacher will give you an F.

The AHA deserves an F, not just for releasing their hypothesis before it’s been tested, but for coming up with such a stupid hypothesis.

Randomized controlled trials, a much higher level of evidence, show that intermittent fasting improves all the most important risk factors for heart disease.

[Graph taken from Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind by Georgia Ede.]

The point of an observational study is to then conduct randomized controlled trials to prove your hypothesis if a correlation is found. But the AMA’s hypothesis is nonsensical because the randomized controlled trials have already been done and showed IF improved heart disease markers!

A High-Quality Review Study Found IF Extremely Helpful For Heart Disease Markers

This review study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nutrients titled: Intermittent Fasting in Cardiovascular Disorders—An Overview

The study authors reviewed the results of ninety-nine high-quality studies. No epidemiological studies were included in the review since serious scientists don’t waste a second looking at those—they’re only for generating sensationalist headlines.

Please take time to read this full quote because this is what actual science sounds like as opposed to 🤡 Science^TM. It doesn’t just claim that IF improves heart disease, it explains the cascade of helpful things IF does in the body.

The Study Summary:

The IF diet limits many risk factors for the development of cardiovascular diseases and therefore the occurrence of these diseases. Fatty acids and ketones become the main energy fuel, because the body undergoes metabolic switching of glucose-ketone (G-to-K). By affecting the biochemical transformations of lipids, it decreases body mass and has a positive influence on lipid profile parameters—it reduces the concentration of total cholesterol, triglycerides, and LDL cholesterol.

Benefit from the use of the IF diet were confirmed in research on the development of atherosclerosis. Intermittent fasting inhibits the development of atherosclerotic plaque by reducing the concentration of inflammatory markers, such as IL-6, homocysteine, and CRP. The IF diet results in an increase in plasma concentrations of adiponectin and a decrease in leptin and resistin concentrations. By altering the levels of these adipokines, it inhibits the adhesion of monocytes to vascular endothelial cells, neutrophils, and macrophage pro-active activity, and platelet aggregation. The transformation of macrophages into foam cells, the formation of extracellular deposits in vessels, and the proliferation and migration of endothelial cells into the inner arterial vascular membrane are limited.

The beneficial effect of the diet was observed in the prevention of hypertension. The intermittent fasting diet causes an increase of BDNF factor, which results in lowering the systolic and diastolic blood pressure by activating the parasympathetic system. BDNF causes acetylcholine to be released by the vagus nerve, which reduces the frequency of heart contractions.

The positive effect of the IF diet has also been documented in obese and diabetic people. The reduced amount of food consumed when using the IF diet results in a decrease in body weight. It also improves glucose metabolism and increases the sensitivity of tissues to insulin by increasing the B cells of the pancreatic islets. The IF diet also limits cardiac hypertrophy [heart enlargement].

In summary, IF does the following which reduces the risk of heart disease: decreases body mass and harmful lipid markers such as triglycerides, reduces atherosclerosis [plaque build up in arteries] by reducing inflammation and platelet aggregation which keeps foam cells from forming in arteries. IF also lowers blood pressure, improves glucose metabolism, and corrects insulin resistance.

If you still doubt this one study, feel free to click on the 99 studies referenced at the bottom. Imagine the stupidity of the AHA believing the data of one measly observational study over hundreds of high-quality studies saying the exact opposite. That’s why I can no longer believe this is ignorance—it’s pure evil.