What does a new study on time restricted eating tell us? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Will restricting how many hours while you’re awake you allow yourself to eat help you lose weight? So called time restricted eating looked promising based on some studies, so Nisa Maruthur, an internal medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues conducted a rigorous study on the strategy.

Maruthur: There was a gap in very few studies had looked at this. Very few in humans, very few had done a controlled feeding study and then very few had lasted for very long like more than a week or had more than like 10 people in it. So we just wanted to do something that would be as informative for evidence in humans as possible. So it still looks like the intervention that's going to be best for you is one you can follow and some people do find that some people eat fewer calories when they're time restricting. That could be beneficial but yeah we didn't find it was magical in itself.   :29

Maruthur notes that animal studies in particular provided dramatic results on the ability of time restricted eating, or TRE, to result in weight loss, but this study doesn’t bear out those results in people, although it may work for some. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.