It’s the most important meal of the day – but the time you eat breakfast also matters.
That’s according to researchers who have found older adults who eat breakfast later in the day die sooner.
“The timing of breakfast could serve as an easy-to-monitor marker of their overall health status,” Dr Hassan Dashti, a nutrition scientist and circadian biologist at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital, who led the study said.
He suggested shifts in mealtimes could be used as an “early warning sign” to look into underlying physical and mental health issues.
Dr Dashti looked at data from nearly 3,000 adults in the UK, with an average age of 64 from the University of Manchester Longitudinal Study of Cognition in Normal Healthy Old Age.
Participants reported the times they ate meals and completed health and lifestyle surveys across multiple years.
Researchers found that as people aged, they tended to eat breakfast and dinner later, and those with more health problems or a genetic tendency to stay up late also tended to eat later.
A later breakfast was associated with physical and psychological illnesses, including fatigue, oral health problems, depression and anxiety.
It was also linked to a slightly higher chance of a person dying during a ten-year follow-up period.
After adjusting for other factors such as age, sex, education levels and lifestyle, each hour breakfast was delayed was associated with a 10 per cent higher risk of death.
However, study authors stress there is no direct cause and effect to eating breakfast later, only an association.
That means eating breakfast later may not shorten a person’s life, but it could indicate underlying health problems, lifestyle patterns or biological differences that influence health – information which could be useful to a GP.
“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,” 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.”
Study authors suggest future trials are needed to explore the potential of meal timing as a strategy to promote longevity in aging populations.
