You will often hear that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. A study suggests that it is not only what you eat that matters but also when you eat it.
More precisely, the research indicates that people who eat breakfast later in the day tend to die sooner.
“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,” said Dr Hassan Dashti, a nutrition scientist and circadian biologist at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital, who led the study. “Patients and clinicians can possibly use shifts in mealtime routines as an early warning sign to look into underlying physical and mental health issues.”
Maintaining a similar breakfast time could help you live longer, it has been suggested
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Dashti and his colleagues looked at data from nearly 3,000 adults in the UK who had an average age of 64 when they were recruited. As these participants aged, they tended to eat breakfast and dinner later, while also narrowing the time window during which they ate each day.
A later breakfast was consistently linked with a higher risk of physical and mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety and fatigue. It was also tied to a slightly higher chance of a person dying during a ten-year follow-up period.
The effect was modest but statistically significant: each extra hour that breakfast was delayed was associated with about a 10 per cent higher risk of death, after adjusting for other factors such as age, sex, education levels and lifestyle.
The researchers cautioned that the findings showed an association, not a direct cause-and-effect relationship. In other words, eating breakfast later may not itself shorten lifespan. It could instead reflect underlying health problems, lifestyle patterns or biological differences that influence health. That might mean that breakfast times could be a useful nugget of data for a GP to have on hand.
• Why breakfast really is the most important meal of the day
The study also found that people with genes that predisposed them to be “night owls”, meaning they go to bed relatively late, also tended to eat meals at later times. Genes linked to obesity did not have a similar link.
“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 Dashti.
“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.”
He added: “Encouraging older adults to keep consistent meal schedules could become part of broader strategies to promote healthy aging and longevity.”