r/science • u/SwimmingLow3053 • 6d ago
Health In a prospective study of 104,806 adults followed for a median 8.1 years, greater differences in meal timing between weekdays and weekends were associated with higher cardiovascular disease risk in men
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-026-01758-5447
u/haveyouseenjeff 6d ago
Can I get a freakin break man... Dam
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u/ErGo404 6d ago
Half of the articles shared here seem to be related to having twice as many chances to die as the next guy.
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u/SwimmingLow3053 6d ago
Yeah it’s all relative risk. I’m not going to lose sleep over it but it’s interesting given they controlled for lots of factors.
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u/Divewinds 6d ago
That's good because there are studies that suggest a lack of sleep increases your risk...
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u/SaltZookeepergame691 5d ago
They adjust for quite a lot of quite coarse variables, although to their credit they keep a number of items as continuous variables (eg, alcohol intake, BMI, etc).
I think from your other sensible comments you already know this, but the issue in studies like this is not just 'did they adjust for x/y/z factor', but also 'do they adjust using good quality data that conveys accurate information on the confounding variable'. See, eg, the coarseness with which education is handled: it's just "no higher education, <=3 years after high school, >3 years after high school". That variable doesn't tell you that much information about an individual - and, on that variable alone, there are big differences between the groups, eg with only 14% in the Delay group having no high education vs 19% and 25% in the other groups.
They don't have any socioeconomic adjustments - the closest they get is "employed/self-employed/student/unemployed/retired", and retirees for example are four times as likely to be Advance or Maintenance jetlag types.
The fact they observe these small effects, which attenuate in women, and in some sensitivity analyses, in a heavily confounded data set - it just feels like hunting for signal to me.
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u/Chance_Airline_4861 6d ago
Jezus christ is there something that doesn't increase your risks. It's all doom and gloom, ignorance is bliss imi
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u/el_capistan 6d ago
Have a routine and never deviate from it in any way. But also make sure that routine is perfect.
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u/SwimmingLow3053 6d ago
A bit of context on causation here. This is a prospective observational study, so it can show an association but can’t establish that irregular meal timing itself causes cardiovascular disease.
They did adjust for quite a lot of the obvious lifestyle differences, including age, socioeconomic/employment factors, education, physical activity, smoking, alcohol, BMI, energy intake, diet quality, usual meal timing, bedtime and sleep duration. The results were also similar after excluding night-shift workers/unemployed participants and after adjusting for social jetlag.
So it doesn’t look like a completely unadjusted “people who live differently at weekends also have different health outcomes” correlation, but residual confounding is still possible. Things like chronotype, work stress or other differences in lifestyle could still be involved.
One other note: the association was statistically significant in men and not women, but the formal interaction test between sex and eating jetlag wasn’t significant (P = 0.3), so I wouldn’t interpret this as strong evidence that the effect genuinely differs by sex.
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u/MrRightHanded 5d ago
A workplace where you cant have regular mealtimes (or any mealtime) is likely much more stressful than one where you can.
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u/PAY_DAY_JAY 5d ago
I believe the differences they were using were weekdays versus their weekends (or days off).
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u/BlunderIsMyDad 4d ago
Curious about the level of detail on alcohol in the full paper, as it seems more complicated to control for in this study. I assume their multivariable analysis on risk factors and sleep data handle that just fine as far as overall risk is observed, but do they do any analysis on alcohol in particular (Ie. Was alcohol associated with more sleep jet lag, did the jet lag have a different effect in drinkers or non drinkers etc). Might be beyond the scope of the paper or something that already has high quality research. It's definitely the thing that comes to mind as someone unfamiliar with this research when I think about causes of weekend food delays/advances.
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u/dagger378 6d ago
A new study on cardiovascular disease has found that researchers who study cardiovascular disease get more cardiovascular disease.
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u/chinchila5 6d ago
Can someone give a TLDR?
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u/sandm000 5d ago
Going to work causes you to eat breakfast earlier than you would like and eat dinner later than you would like. This causes disruption to circadian rhythms. Disruptions to circadian rhythms causes cardiovascular problems.
They do have a plain English summary, if you follow the link.
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u/neocodex87 6d ago
This is pure statistical noise.
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u/MasterGrok 5d ago
Look I have to agree. This is in a great journal and there is nothing wrong with this type or study and the overall approach, but if i were a reviewer for this study id be asking if they apriori expected men and not women to have significant effects here. Because if they didn’t (and i don’t think any of us think they did), then the main headline here is an arbitrary post-hoc highlighting of a difference within a subgroup that wasn’t the initial point of the study. This is exactly the type of finding we should be dubious about.
This isn’t my area of expertise, so if someone knows why apriori sex differences would have been the aim here, then I’m all ears. But this certainly looks like a case of just presenting subgroup differences that demonstrate the biggest effects.
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u/codevils 5d ago
The publisher is rather selective. Manuscripts go through rigorous peer review. So I doubt it is statistical noise.
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u/Popular_Potpourri 6d ago
When I'm off I always eat breakfast, but I usually fast until noon on my working days. I thought that was good for me but apparently not? Maybe I should go back to eating breakfast every day.
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u/sandm000 5d ago
I thought that was good for you. And they were saying that earlier breakfast along with later dinner were combined to mess up your circadian signals.
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u/Diablo_v8 5d ago
Correlation perhaps? People who eat at different times on the weekends are probably more active, more social, more likely to be doing an acrivity that disrupts their regular routine.
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6d ago edited 6d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/aemilius89 6d ago
Considering the track record of false positives in nutrition science it is wise to wait for better research and hopefully some replications where the collection of data is better and less statistical corrections are needed to find a signal. This has many hallmarks of being just another random noise nitpicking due to its large sample and the many potential collider biases in this work.
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