Diets are funny things. They aren’t just a way to lose or gain weight – a diet is part of your life.

Eating is one of the fundamental human recreational activities, which means that food is family, food is friends, food is sharing, culture and life no matter where you go.

What this means is that we are often really passionate about what we eat. This goes doubly for diets. Nothing starts an online argument more quickly than saying a diet – any diet – isn’t the best of them all.

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Which brings us to intermittent fasting. And why it probably isn’t any better than most other diets, even if it is a bit more popular.

Hopefully we all escape the comments section alive.

Intermittent fasting describes a range of diets that all follow the same basic idea – you eat as much as you want in a certain time period, but spend some portion of your life fasting by either eating very few calories or nothing at all. Some examples are the popular 5:2 diet, where you eat normally 5 days a week and restrict yourself to very little food on the other 2, or the various time-restricted fasts like the 10:14 or 16:8, where you only eat during a set number of hours a day.

The basic idea is that fasting causes any number of changes in your body, and that doing this regularly doesn’t just help you restrict calories but actually modifies how your body works to make you healthier. There’s some research in mice and rats supporting this, showing that intermittent fasting can have impacts beyond the fact that you’re eating a bit less, although other studies have sometimes failed to replicate these results.

If we can say nothing else definitive about intermittent fasting diets, it’s that they are incredibly popular. Celebrities endorse them, online testimonials praise them, and intermittent fasting is in the news as least once a month as the miracle diet that will solve your weight problems forever. Most recently, a study supposedly showed that moderate intermittent fasting regimens can have massive benefits for your life!

Sadly, the reality seems to be a bit less positive than the optimistic headlines.

While these stories sound fantastic on paper, when you look at the evidence as a whole intermittent fasting doesn’t seem to do much better than any other diet. Most individual studies on intermittent fasting are quite small, but if you do what’s known as a systematic review and meta-analysis – combining the results of every study out there in a systematic way – the whole picture becomes a bit clearer.

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In review after review, looking at a wide range of studies on the topic we get the same picture: intermittent fasting makes people lose weight, sure, but not more than any other diet. Some studies have found very modest benefits for other potential health hazards, like high cholesterol and blood pressure, but these results are very preliminary and not universal across trials. There’s currently no good, consistent evidence that intermittent fasting is better than bog-standard low-calorie diets for heart disease, diabetes or a range of health conditions. It’s possible that intermittent fasting is better, but so far the evidence just isn’t there.

Some of this is probably because “intermittent fasting” is such a blanket term. The 5:2 diet isn’t really that similar to the 16:8 one, but they’re lumped in together for convenience, and because they rely on the same basic theory. It’s possible that we’ve simply yet to discover the best way to fast, especially considering that these diets are rarely tested directly against one another.

It seems that intermittent fasting works – it makes you lose weight, improves blood pressure, and can even help with diabetes. The flipside is that it doesn’t work any better than any other diet – you can either restrict calories by cutting out a meal a day, or just making all of your meals smaller, for example. There’s also some evidence that intermittent eating patterns are associated with the development of eating disorders, although it’s not clear if this is just an association or whether the fasting might be causing psychological issues.

It can also be pretty hard to follow an intermittent fasting diet, because as I said food is more than just fuel. Skipping food entirely is easy until it’s your child’s birthday party, or a religious festival, or there’s a pop-up food event prominently featuring Korean fried chicken and luxury gelato.

Ultimately, intermittent fasting may seem like a silver bullet, but the evidence indicates that it’s really just one of many potentially effective dietary options.

As I’ve said before, the best diet is usually the one that works for you.