Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, often shortened to NAFLD, is a condition where too much fat is stored in the liver, sometimes leading to liver damage and increasing the risk for other health issues related to metabolism.
This becomes a concern when the liver’s weight is composed of more than 10% fat.
Without currently available medications to directly treat NAFLD, most healthcare professionals recommend weight loss and adopting a low-fat diet as viable strategies to manage the condition by reducing liver inflammation and available fats in the body.
In the quest for effective management of NAFLD, researchers from Southern Medical University in China and Tulane University School of Public Health in the United States teamed up to examine two popular dieting strategies: time-restricted eating and calorie restriction.
Time-Restricted vs. Calorie-Restricted Diets
Time-restricted eating is a dietary approach where individuals consume all their daily calories within a specific window of time each day.
This method has gained attention as a potential alternative to traditional calorie-restricted diets and has shown promising results in preliminary studies with rats and initial observational studies in humans.
However, its comparative effectiveness in managing NAFLD in humans needed further exploration.
Researchers designed a study involving 88 participants, all of whom had obesity and NAFLD, to dig deeper into the effects of these two dietary approaches.
The participants were divided into two groups: one followed a time-restricted eating plan (consuming all daily food between 8:00 am and 4:00 pm), and the other adhered to a calorie-restricted diet.
Intriguingly, both groups maintained the same total daily caloric intake to ensure a fair comparison.
The primary focus was to monitor changes in intrahepatic triglyceride (IHTG) content, a metric representing fat storage within the liver.
Reductions in IHTG suggest improvements in managing NAFLD, as lowering liver fat is a crucial part of managing the disease.
The Results: Equal Effectiveness in Managing Liver Fat
After a period of 6 months, both groups showed a reduction in IHTG: 8.3% for the time-restricted eating group and 8.1% for the calorie-restricted group.
The reductions maintained a similar pattern at the 12-month check, with the time group showing a 6.9% reduction and the calorie group showing a 7.9% reduction.
Alongside these primary findings, secondary factors like liver stiffness, overall body weight, and various metabolic risk factors were found to be similarly reduced in both groups.
Concluding the study, the researchers affirmed that time-restricted eating did not showcase any additional benefits over calorie restriction when it comes to reducing body fat, visceral fat, and managing NAFLD in individuals with obesity.
Essentially, both dietary approaches showed comparable effectiveness, thereby not establishing one as superior to the other in the context of managing fatty liver disease.
In light of these findings, individuals exploring dietary approaches to manage NAFLD may consider both time-restricted and calorie-restricted diets as viable options, choosing the method that aligns best with their lifestyle and preferences, under the guidance of healthcare professionals.
If you care about nutrition, please read studies about the best time to take vitamins to prevent heart disease, and vitamin D supplements strongly reduce cancer death.
For more information about nutrition, please see recent studies about plant nutrient that could help reduce high blood pressure, and these antioxidants could help reduce dementia risk.
The research findings can be found in JAMA Network Open.
Follow us on Twitter for more articles about this topic.
Copyright © 2023 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
