How can time restricted eating be fairly studied for weight loss? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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If you’re thinking of using time restricted eating, where you only consume food for a shortened part of your waking hours, for weight loss, results of a new study from Johns Hopkins may inform. Nisa Maruthur, a primary care physician, and colleagues, rigorously investigated the strategy.

Maruthur: It's a controlled feeding study so we gave them all their food for the 12 weeks they ate on site three times a week we had them fill out a daily diary to kind of figure out what they're eating and there was a lot of coaching and intervention around helping them eat only our food and nothing else the other thing that was crucial for this study is we kept it isocaloric meaning we figured out how many calories you need a baseline and we gave you that number of calories so that was fixed if we figured out you need 2000 calories a day for weight maintenance then we gave you 2000 calories that was a big distinction from other studies we thought was really important for understanding the independent effective timing of feeding.                   :31

Results indicate that time restricted eating did not result in more weight loss or improve other aspects of someone’s overall health compared with a normal eating group. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.