NEW Study shows Intermittent Fasting can cause eating disorders

What is going on, iWarriors? So today we have a new study that was released. This study dropped December 2022, so very, very recent. And it looks at intermittent fasting describing engagement and associations with eating disorder behaviors and psychopathology among Canadian adolescents and young adults. Now, let's look at the highlights of this study. Intermittent fasting has grown in popularity in recent years. Intermittent fasting was common in a sample of Canadian adolescents and young adults and intermittent fasting was associated with eating disorder behaviors and psychopathology. Okay. This is one of the things that is driven home so much against intermittent fasting. Because of the fact that there's the fasting elements inside of intermittent fasting, because that exists, there's always, always been this elephant in the room of unhealthiness, eating disorder. Even though we've had a lot of studies that show that there are health benefits that come directly from intermittent fasting in and of itself, where you can't get those health benefits doing other diets or whatever. So we've seen that there's health elements, just physiological health benefits and biological health benefits with intermittent fasting. We've also seen where intermittent fasting has shined above just normal caloric restriction, even though intermittent fasting is caloric restriction as well, but it does have the elements of ketone bodies and creating ketones from fatty acids, which help calorie partitioning and burning more body fat as opposed to just normally doing caloric restriction. They've also shown studies where caloric restriction and intermittent fasting are similar. After eight months, after 12 months, there isn't any difference in terms of what you get physiologically, biologically, there isn't much of a difference. So we've seen those studies. We rarely see studies where caloric restriction is just so much better in intermittent fasting, just you're completely unhealthy. Your body is much more unhealthy because of intermittent fasting. We don't see studies like that. However, for some reason, they want to look at intermittent fasting and try to determine if intermittent fasting causes eating disorder. But you can look at caloric restriction and see if that also causes eating disorder, because when it all boils down to it, it's not the diet itself, it is the person who is trying to lose weight. And that person who has an eating disorder, that person who feels that need to have compulsive reactions to weight and losing weight where they might do things like vomiting and using laxative and things of that nature. What's going on in that is that they're just looking for a tool to lose weight. This study has a lot of limitations, a lot. And the reason it has a lot of limitations, although they're N equals 2,762, which means they had 2,762 participants for this study, this study was not crossed. This study was not done in a controlled environment with a control, which means this being the intervention, intermittent fasting, they didn't look at this same group of people within the scope of, well, let's look at you when you do the Mediterranean diet. Let's look at you when you're doing caloric restriction. Let's look at you. You're grabbing a group of people and saying, okay, you guys are choosing intermittent fasting as a weight loss tool. We're going to focus on this and see if this causes eating disorder. Once again, the stigma of the word fasting has always been the dark cloud of intermittent fasting. This has always been the elephant in the room that people just want to say, oh, this has got to be unhealthy, right? Because you're not eating, right? When in reality, it's just meal timing and caloric restriction, insulin control, hormonal control. That's all it is. Of course, they're going to look at this and try to discern, hey, look, intermittent fasting, it creates some type of psychopathological eating disorder behavior that you see from eating disorders. Now, it's been broken down and they already explained the limitations here. If we go down to study limitations and continue research. Now, the full study, I'm not able to show you the full study here because it's not available for me to show, but they do have some breakdowns of the limitations here. This is the breakdown. In addition, the first super big limitation is the study cannot determine whether intermittent fasting causes eating disorder or the other way around, which means people already have an eating disorder and they're choosing intermittent fasting or people already have an eating disorder and they're choosing caloric deficit, being at a caloric deficit. The thing is you could have an eating disorder, if you're prone to an eating disorder, if you're prone to eating disorder, before intermittent fasting was even popularized, there was widespread eating disorder for a lot of people. What did they use? Caloric restriction. For some reason, this is the thing, for some reason, people want to scapegoat intermittent fasting because it has the word fasting in it, so it must be psychologically unhealthy to do. That's literally the gist of what these researchers try to do. In addition, the data collection methods relied heavy on participant self-reporting, which can lead to potential errors. While the sample was diverse, there's still a potential for selection bias based on the methods used for selecting those participants. It was an epidemiology study, so it's a disconnected study. It's almost like you're looking into the lifestyle as opposed to creating a methodology and then putting people inside of that methodology and working with that so there's more control, there's more rigor. That's not the case here. It's more of an observation of somebody living their life, which can cause so many problems in terms of the bias or just the control. You can't really control what's going on. There was also the possibility for participants to interpret the survey questions differently, increasing the risk of respawn bias. Finally, the questions may not have captured all eating disorder cognition and behaviors. All limitations indicate the need for further research into this area. Despite these challenges, healthcare professionals can still glean insight. Ganson, noted, which is one of the researchers from the paper, noted a few clinical implications for research. Then they talk about what to do here. The data from this study indicates that IF may be problematic and associated with severe and harmful eating disorder attitudes and behavior, even though we already see that they can't even determine if intermittent fasting is the cause of these eating disorders. People just say, oh, I have an eating disorder or this is how I view food or my relationship with food and I'm choosing to do intermittent fasting or I'm choosing to do caloric restriction or I'm choosing to do Mediterranean diet. It's just frustrating and annoying to me that they constantly look at intermittent fasting and try to say, that's the thing, that's the thing, that's the thing when eating disorders have been a thing even before intermittent fasting was popular in the mainstream media and they just did caloric restriction and when they just do that zoom in, when they just do that microscopic zoom in and act as if the only diet that causes this is intermittent fasting to me is incredibly misleading and it's annoying to see those kind of headlines. Oh, intermittent fasting can be unhealthy, could cause eating disorders when in reality it is no different than every other diet. It's no different than caloric restriction. It's no different than doing the Mediterranean diet. All of those diets require an intervention. All of those diets require a certain level of dedication. All of those diets require a certain level of willpower and a certain level of consistency and all of that can be viewed as having some sort of a disordered eating, right, having some sort of over-exaggeration on health and over-exaggeration on weight loss because if you're 400 pounds, for example, or if you're, let's say, your normal weight, right, but you want to lose belly fat, like that could, right there, the moment you decide that you want to lose belly fat, that could all be an indicator of, oh, is this person unhealthy? Is this person having an eating disorder? Is this person, that all of that stuff can be viewed that way, body dysmorphia, all of those different things, but it's not just centered on intermittent fasting. It is a 100% an issue that needs to be resolved, but it's not just centered on intermittent fasting. When looking at studies, all of the different diets rank the same. When looking at a study that looked at over 460 different diets, they all rank the same in terms of what can cause psychological issues, what can cause depression, what can cause eating disorders. They all rank the same except intuitive eating. Intuitive eating was the only one that ranked the best in terms of what could cause those eating disorders, but the issue with intuitive eating is it doesn't actually help you lose weight. So, yes, it's adjacent to the diets. It's within the vertical, but it's a side step to the actual diets, but it doesn't help you lose weight. It doesn't actually help you lose weight, and that's a problem. That's a big, big problem because if your goal is to lose weight, intuitive eating is not going to help you. If your goal is to recapture mental health and feel confident and feel good about yourself and not focus on anything regarding weight loss and all of that stuff, then intuitive eating will help you, but it all depends on what your actual goal is. My point in doing this video is that I need to tackle these kinds of studies because they're incredibly misleading, and they act as if intermittent fasting is the only thing that can cause these things to happen when even the limitations itself cannot even prove or show or indicate that this even is happening because of intermittent fasting. It could simply just be happening because that's the way the person is, and they happen, and of that group, they happen to have chosen intermittent fasting, but that doesn't mean that intermittent fasting causes eating disorders, if you get what I'm saying. All right. Anyways, the studies, the science is still not enough for us to make a determination either way, but in my opinion, all diets have the risk of having somebody who has an eating disorder to be utilizing that diet. Let me know what you guys think down in the comment section below. Hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, and you know we're doing videos every single day, and of course, as always, guys, peace out.