© Christin Klose / Picture-Alliance / Dpa / AP Images
No matter what your stance on a particular topic is, you can nearly
always find a study that supports your point of view. What matters more than being able to find a published study with a particular outcome is the quality of that study. Case in point:
last Monday, researchers presented unpublished (read: not peer-reviewed) data from an observational study, concluding that time-restricted eating (TRE) was associated with a 91% increase in the risk of cardiovascular (CV) death, which resulted in a frenzy of headlines by many news outlets. If you already think that TRE is harmful to health, you might take the headline at face value; but if you look with a closer eye, you'll find that the results from this study are virtually meaningless.
What do we know about this study?This study was presented as a
poster at a conference, meaning that study details are limited and the full study still needs to be peer-reviewed before publication, as noted above. Randomized trials have been used to study the potential health benefits of TRE, but usually with limited duration. The motivation for this study was to see if long-term use of TRE affected mortality, something that would be extremely difficult to do with a randomized trial. For this retrospective, observational study, the researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) collected between 2003 and 2018 from more than 20,000 people in the US. Each year, NHANES collects demographic, biomarker, and dietary data from approximately 5,000 randomly selected US residents to track changes in overall population trends. Each food recall questionnaire requires the participant to remember what they ate, how much, and at what times on the previous day. This study required that every participant completed two food recall surveys less than two weeks apart, and averaged their two feeding windows to determine each person's eating duration.
Comment: Although increased chronic hives resulting from Moderna's mRNA vaccines and fewer with Pfizer's mRNA vaccines are undeniably unpleasant, it's important to recognize that this article overlooks the more severe and potentially life-threatening side effects associated with these vaccines.
These include but are not limited to blood clots, myocarditis, pericarditis, and unfortunately, instances of excessive mortality, particularly among young, healthy individuals, predominantly men, and athletes.
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