Time-Restricted Eating to Improve Cardiovascular Health

Time-restricted eating (TRE) is a form of intermittent fasting that involves confining the eating window to 4-10 h and fasting for the remaining hours of the day. The purpose of this review is to summarize the current literature pertaining to the effects of TRE on body weight and cardiovascular disease risk factors.

Human trial findings show that TRE reduces body weight by 1-4% after 1-16 weeks in individuals with obesity, relative to controls with no meal timing restrictions. This weight loss results from unintentional reductions in energy intake (~350-500 kcal/day) that occurs when participants confine their eating windows to 4-10 h/day. TRE is also effective in lowering fat mass, blood pressure, triglyceride levels, and markers of oxidative stress, versus controls. This fasting regimen is safe and produces few adverse events. These findings suggest that TRE is a safe diet therapy that produces mild reductions in body weight and also lowers several key indicators of cardiovascular disease in participants with obesity.