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22.03.2024

Intermittent fasting | Lose fat without reducing bone density

If you want to lose weight but are careful with your muscle mass at the same time, part-time fasting might be an interesting option. Part-time fasting also seems to protect your bone mass, Spanish health scientists report in Nutrients.

Study
Researchers from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha published a meta-study in which they aggregated and reanalyzed the results of 7 previously published randomized and placebo-controlled trials. The trials involved a total of 313 adults who did part-time fasting for 4-24 months.

In most trials, the subjects ate during an 8-hour window of 24 hours. In only 2 trials did the researchers combine part-time fasting with exercise.

The researchers cannot rule out the possibility of bias in the trials they used. "The quality of the evidence of the effect of time-restricted eating interventions on bone mass density was 'low' since the certainty assessment showed serious concerns regarding the risk of bias and imprecision," they write.

Results
The Spaniards found no indications that part-time fasting was at the expense of bone density. The figure below shows this.

In the figure, Ex stands for exercise, INT for intervention, MD for mean difference, MetS for metabolic syndrome, Ob for obesity, Ov for overweight and TRE for time-restricted eating.

Click on it for a larger version.

Conclusion
Part-time fasting therefore does not appear to harm the skeleton. The researchers do note that the available trials pay little attention to the most important risk groups when it comes to osteoporosis - such as postmenopausal women.

"Consequently, it is necessary to conduct further randomized controlled trial with a larger sample size that should focus on people at risk for bone fragility (i.e., post-menopausal women) in the long term (longer than 6 months)", the Spaniards write.

Source:
Nutrients 2024, 16, 876.

More:
Weight loss through exercise is better for your bones than dieting 29.05.2012

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