There is a National Death Index (NDI) that has information on more than 100 million Americans who died. It includes name, date of death, state where a person died, and the cause of death as listed on the death certificate.

The database is not open to the public. However, it is available for research projects.

Say, for example, your research team is investigating deaths by auto accident and make of car. You have the names of 20,000 people who bought cars during the last twenty years. You want to know how many of those car owners died in one-car accidents. You apply to the NDI, explaining your project. After you receive permission to access the database, you submit your 20,000 names. For any of those who have died, the cause of death will be provided. The number of those who died in one-car accidents could then be extracted, and you could break it down by vehicle.

You then report the one-car accident death rates by the make of car. Except we don’t know whether the people were traveling in the cars they bought. But let’s move on. I made up that example so I could tell you this.

This March, some researchers reported to the American Heart Association that people who ate in an eight-hour time period or less had a 91 percent higher chance of dying of cardiovascular disease.

I am what is called a 16/8 intermittent faster. I don’t eat anything after seven p.m. and don’t have breakfast until eleven a.m. That’s 16 hours of fasting followed by an eight hour eating window. So naturally I was curious how the researchers got their findings.

They took information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2003 through 2018. The researchers analyzed responses from 20,078 adults who recorded when they ate for two 24-hour periods. Those names were then compared to the NDI to see who among those 20,078 had died and why.

They found that 2,797 people had died, including 840 from cardiovascular disease. They broke down those 840 deaths by the number of hours during which each person ate. They found that those with an eating window of eight hours or less were 91 percent more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than those with a twelve to sixteen-hour eating window.

Major news sources were quick to report the results and proclaim that intermittent fasting is dangerous. Am I worried? No. Here’s why.

The surveys were self-submitted and were for two 24-hour periods only. We don’t know if this is how the people ate every day. Maybe after taking the survey, they changed their eating habits. Or maybe during the two survey days they were not hungry or feeling well.

There was no listing of what the people ate. Maybe, being hungry, they tended to eat badly, stuffing themselves with junk. We don’t know.

Because of these and other flaws in the research, the results feel like a classic case of crap science.