Meal timing, frequency, breakfast, intermittent fasting and cardiovascular disease, AHA review

Few weeks ago the American Heart Association published a new review about mealtime and frequency and its relationship with cardiovascular disease prevention: Meal Timing and Frequency: Implications for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association "(2017), a document with hundreds of references, in which a team of experts reviewed observational and interventional evidence.



Here we include what we found most interesting, the final conclusions for each of the issues analyzed:

Breakfast: "On the basis of the combined epidemiological and clinical intervention data, daily breakfast consumption among US adults may decrease the risk of adverse effects related to glucose and insulin metabolism. In addition, comprehensive dietary counseling that supports daily breakfast consumption may be helpful in promoting healthy dietary habits throughout the day".

Intermittent fasting: "There is evidence that both alternate-day fasting and periodic fasting may be effective for weight loss, although there are no data that indicate whether the weight loss can be sustained long term. In addition, both eating patterns may be useful for lowering triglyceride concentrations but have little or no effect on total, LDL, or HDL cholesterol concentrations. These protocols may also be beneficial for lowering blood pressure, but a minimum weight loss of 6% may be required to see an effect. Intermittent fasting may also be effective for decreasing fasting insulin and IR, but fasting glucose remains largely unchanged. Future work in this area should aim to examine whether these effects still persist in longer-term (>52 weeks) randomized, controlled trials."

Meal frequency: "Altering meal frequency under isocaloric conditions may not be useful for decreasing body weight or improving traditional cardiometabolic risk factors".

Meal timing: "The impact of meal timing, particularly related to the evening meal, deserves further study. Epidemiological findings suggest a potential detrimental effect of late meals on cardiometabolic health, but clinical intervention studies, which would address causality, have been
limited in scope and too diverse to draw definitive conclusions and make recommendations. Moreover, the potential benefit of increased meal frequency should be evaluated in the context of timing and duration of the daily prandial period."

Full document here. New possibilities in sight?