Intermittent fasting may not be as helpful for losing weight as once thought, study finds

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Are snacks before bed your vice? Or do you prefer to wait a few hours after you wake up to eat?

The timing of meals may not have as big an impact on weight as once thought, according to a new study.

The study tracked the portion sizes and eating times of 547 people, in addition to data on their health and weight, over the course of six years. The data showed no association between an interval of the day in which people had their meals and their weight, according to the study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Restricting eating times, as seen in diet trends such as intermittent fasting, has been a popular method to try to lose weight in recent years.

But the researchers found no association between restricting eating times and weight loss, said principal investigator of the study Dr. Wendy Bennett, an associate professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. That included how long people ate after waking up, how long their window of eating was throughout the day and how close to going to bed they ate, she noted.

Instead, smaller meals were associated with weight loss, she said.

“Based on other studies that have come out, including ours, we are starting to think that timing of meals through the day most likely doesn’t immediately result in weight loss,” Bennett said, adding the caveat that for some people, timing meals may be a useful tool in tracking nutrition.

The results of this study should be taken with a grain of salt, experts cautioned.

There were few racial and ethnic minorities among the participants, noted Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. There are also many social determinants of health, such as stress and people’s environment, that could be added to the data, Stanford added.

Those factors could be important for getting a better look at the effects of meal timing, added Alice Lichtenstein, professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University.

“I suspect that…