Talk:Intermittent fasting

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Ideal sources for Wikipedia's health content are defined in the guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) and are typically review articles. Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about Intermittent fasting. PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles) The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine. Other potential sources include: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and CDC

The content of 5:2 diet was merged into Intermittent fasting. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. For the discussion at that location, see its talk page.

Study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871402125000955 Summary: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0l6ye6xe12o Eating duration <8 h was linked to 135 % higher cardiovascular mortality, but was not associated with all-cause and cancer mortality. Trismax (talk) 17:20, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi - sorry, nobody replied to your post here - thank you for suggesting the change here before making it. As I see it, the source you've suggested is primary, so wouldn't be compliant with the WP:MEDRS sourcing guidelines. Girth Summit _(blether) 16:44, 4 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

From the text of the article (as currently written):

"The reductions in body weight can be attributed to the loss of fat mass and some lean mass. For time restricted eating the ratio of weight loss is 4:1 for fat mass to lean mass, respectively. Alternate-day fasting does not affect lean body mass, although one review found a small decrease."

This gives people the impression that time-restricted eating within one day is likely to cause the loss of lean muscle mass, but that alternating-day fasting, where one fasts for an entire day or more, isn't. That doesn't make any sense though, as more time without any calorie intake makes it more likely for the body to use some of its own muscle tissue for energy, not less likely. And in fact when I clicked on the link in one of the references regarding alternate-day fasting, it said the following: "On the other hand, preservation of fat‐free mass, at the cost of fat mass during weight reduction 18 is unexpected with the level of energy restriction that ADF prescribes. To our knowledge, this is the first review to report this finding. The mechanism for this effect, if confirmed by other studies, is unclear, although it is possible that either the fasting period is brief enough that there is less loss of lean tissue in the first place, or that the days where full energy needs are met allow for recovery of fat‐free mass by rebuilding lean tissue lost on the fasting days." [1]

....So, long story short, the WP:SYNTH of studies on the two different types of fasting create the misleading impression that there's a causal relationship between longer fasting duration and less muscle loss, when if anything it would be the other way around, and the most likely explanation for the apparent discrepancy is limited data, confounding variables in the various studies, etc. -2003:CA:873A:15B2:ABD6:DDF2:57AD:7797 (talk) 12:59, 16 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]