Tejal Somvanshi
A new study reveals that the timing of your first meal might be just as important as what’s on your plate when it comes to living longer. Researchers found that older adults who eat breakfast later in the day face a modestly higher risk of death compared to those who start their day with an earlier meal.
The research, published this month in Communications Medicine, tracked nearly 3,000 adults from the UK over more than 20 years. Scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School analyzed how meal timing changes as people age and how these patterns might affect health and longevity.
“Up until now, we had limited insight into how the timing of meals evolves later in life and how this shift relates to overall health and longevity,” said Dr. Hassan Dashti, the study’s lead author from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
The research team discovered that as people grow older, they tend to eat breakfast and dinner later in the day. For each decade of aging, breakfast time shifted about eight minutes later and dinner about four minutes later. At the same time, the window between the first and last meal of the day actually narrowed.
Most importantly, the study found that for each hour breakfast was delayed, the risk of death from any cause increased by approximately 8-11% after researchers adjusted for other factors. Those who maintained earlier meal times showed better survival rates, with about 89.5% surviving for 10 years compared to 86.7% among those who ate later.
This doesn’t mean that simply eating breakfast earlier will automatically extend your life. The researchers emphasize that later breakfast times may instead serve as a warning sign of underlying health issues.
“Later breakfast timing could serve as a simple marker of health in older adults,” Dashti explained. Several health conditions were linked to delayed morning meals, including depression, anxiety, fatigue, and oral health problems.
For instance, depression and fatigue might reduce morning appetite or slow down morning routines. Dental problems and difficulty chewing can make eating uncomfortable, leading people to postpone their first meal of the day.
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The findings contribute to the growing field of “chrononutrition,” which examines how meal timing affects health. This research suggests that circadian rhythms – the body’s internal clock – and eating schedules may play important roles in healthy aging.
The study comes at a time when intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating are gaining popularity. However, Dashti cautioned that these eating patterns might affect older adults differently than younger people.
For older adults looking to improve their health, maintaining consistent meal schedules throughout the day may be beneficial. Regular eating patterns could help support the body’s natural rhythms that contribute to healthy aging and longevity.
The researchers note that their findings are observational, showing only an association between meal timing and mortality risk, not a direct cause-and-effect relationship. Randomized clinical trials would be needed to determine whether deliberately shifting breakfast to earlier hours could improve health outcomes.
Still, monitoring breakfast times could provide healthcare providers with a simple way to spot potential health issues in older patients. As Dashti put it, shifts in mealtime routines might serve as “an early warning sign to look into underlying physical and mental health issues.”
For now, the age-old advice that breakfast is the most important meal of the day seems to have gained new meaning – especially for seniors, for whom the timing of that first meal might be just as crucial as what’s on the plate.
