Does intermittent fasting raise the risk of early death?

Introduction

I was browsing online, when a news site popped up with the headline “Intermittent fasting may raise your risk of an early death” (Ref 1). I’m not the biggest fan of intermittent fasting, but I don’t think it’s a deadly activity to adopt (I summarise my view in Ref 2). We’ve looked at intermittent fasting a number of times in Monday notes (Ref 3). I located the academic article behind the headlines. It was called “Meal Skipping and Shorter Meal Intervals Are Associated with Increased Risk of All-Cause and Cardiovascular Disease Mortality among US Adults” and it was by Sun et al (Ref 4).

The objective of the study was “to examine the associations of meal frequency, skipping, and intervals with all-cause and cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality.”