Eating Breakfast Late Could Be Taking Years Off Your Life

From the way we look to the way we walk, many things tend to change as we age. And as a new study by researchers at Mass General Brigham shows, the time of day we typically eat our meals also shifts over the years. Although the findings suggest that you may want to monitor your eating windows, as when you eat could predict an early death. 

“As people get older, changes in health and daily routines can affect when they eat their meals,” the study’s authors wrote. To understand how this shift impacts their overall health, the researchers examined data from nearly 3000 older adults who participated in the University of Manchester’s Longitudinal Study of Cognition in Normal Healthy Old Age, which tracked them over several decades.

“Participants reported the times they ate meals and completed health and lifestyle surveys across multiple years,” the authors of this latest study explained. “We found that as people aged, they tended to eat breakfast and dinner later.” And that was especially true for breakfast. According to the findings, over the five decades of the study, breakfast times shifted by about 45 minutes on average. 

The researchers observed that changes in meal timing are linked to both health and genetics. For example, people who frequently reported feeling fatigued were more likely to delay breakfast. They also found that later breakfast times were “consistently associated” with depression and anxiety. Additionally, they discovered that oral health issues and difficulties chewing or swallowing were connected to a shorter daily eating window. Essentially, the more health challenges people reported, the more their meal schedules shifted with age. As for genetics, they noted that individuals predisposed to be “night owls” tended to eat their meals later as well.

Next, the researchers examined how this change in meal timing affects long-term health outcomes, and, well, they aren’t great for those who shift their meals later and later as the years go on. 

To reach this conclusion, the team divided the study participants into two groups: Early and late eaters. After 10 years, those in the early eating group had a survival rate of 89.5%, compared to 86.7% in the late group. And, as Science Alert noted, for each additional hour of delay in breakfast, the all-cause mortality risk (dying for any reason) increased by 8 to 11% over the study period. 

“Up until now, we had a limited insight into how the timing of meals evolves later in life and how this shift relates to overall health and longevity,” Dr. Hassan Dashti, the lead author of the study and a nutrition scientist and circadian biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, shared. “Our findings help fill that gap by showing that later meal timing, especially delayed breakfast, is tied to both health challenges and increased mortality risk in older adults. These results add new meaning to the saying that ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day,’ especially for older individuals.”

The authors explained that their study cannot prove cause and effect (i.e., if you eat later, you die earlier), but they do suggest a strong association between the two, adding that more research is needed to fully understand why this is happening and what it could mean for elder patient care.

“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. Patients and clinicians can possibly use shifts in mealtime routines as an early warning sign to look into underlying physical and mental health issues,” Dashti added. “Also, encouraging older adults [to have] consistent meal schedules could become part of broader strategies to promote healthy aging and longevity.”