Eating Breakfast Later Could Be an ‘Early Warning Sign’

Eating breakfast later as you age may be a harbinger of bad health.

“Meal timing, particularly later breakfast, shifts with age and may reflect broader health changes in older adults, with implications for morbidity and longevity,” researchers from Mass General Brigham said in a new study, published in Communications Medicine.

For the study, researchers looked at data from 2,945 older adults aged 42–94 for more than 20 years: “We 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. Importantly, eating breakfast later with aging was linked to a higher risk of death.”

“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,” lead author Hassan Dashti, PhD, RD, a nutrition scientist and circadian biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, said in a Mass General Brigham press release.

“Patients and clinicians can possibly use shifts in mealtime routines as an early warning sign to look into underlying physical and mental health issues,” he said.

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“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,” senior author Dr. Altug Didikoglu, MSc, of the Izmir Institute of Technology in Turkey, said in the statement. “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.”

He continued: “These results add new meaning to the saying that ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day,’ especially for older individuals.”