Key Points
- Eating breakfast earlier may be a simple, daily habit that supports better health and a longer life as we age.
- Researchers found that later breakfasts were linked to depression, fatigue, poor sleep, and a higher risk of death.
- The study highlights “chrononutrition,” showing that when we eat, not just what we eat, impacts healthy aging.
It’s often said that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and a new study from Massachusetts General Brigham emphasizes the adage. It also indicates an easy change that older adults can make that might boost their health and longevity. As we get older, what and how we eat tends to change, but until this study, less has been known about how meal timing impacts our health.
What the Study Found
Published in Communications Medicine, the study examined key aspects of meal timing that are significant for aging populations to determine whether certain patterns might signal, or even influence, health outcomes later in life. The research team analyzed data, including blood samples, from 2,945 adults, aged 42 to 94 years old, living in a community in the UK. The study group was followed for more than 20 years. They found that as the older adults aged, they tended to eat breakfast and dinner at later times, while also narrowing the overall time window in which they ate each day.
Impact of Later Breakfast
While it might not sound problematic, having a later breakfast time was consistently associated with having physical and mental health conditions, including depression, fatigue, and oral health problems.
Beyond that, the study also noted difficulty with meal preparation and worse sleep were also linked with later mealtimes. Most notably, later breakfast timing was associated with an increased risk of death during follow-up. The researchers adjusted for age in their statistical models—so they weren’t simply comparing older vs. younger participants. Even with these adjustments, they still found that later breakfast timing (specifically) was linked to a higher risk of multimorbidity and mortality.
Lead researcher Hassan Dashti, a nutrition scientist and circadian biologist at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, explained that the study provides missing information about how the timing of meals evolves in later life and how the shift impacts overall health and longevity. He notes that later meal timing, particularly eating breakfast later, is associated with both health challenges and increased mortality in older adults.
Why Meal Timing Is Important
Research on healthy eating has often focused on what should be eaten; this study underlines the importance of chrononutrition, the study of the timing of eating, as a modifiable risk factor for adverse health outcomes. Notably, that meal timing, especially breakfast, could serve as a simple marker of health in older adults and may guide future strategies for healthy aging. It is something that patients and their doctors can be aware of.
“Our research suggests that changes in when older adults eat, especially the timing of breakfast, could serve as an easy-to-monitor marker of their overall health status,” says Dashti. Also, encouraging older adults to have consistent meal schedules could become part of broader strategies to promote healthy aging and longevity, he adds.
While the study doesn’t conclusively prove that eating breakfast earlier will lead to better health or longer life—the evidence does suggest a possible association. Earlier breakfast tends to correlate with better health outcomes and survival—so why wait?
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