Older adults who chow down on breakfast well after sunrise could be in for a rude awakening.
A new study out of Mass General Brigham reveals how meal timing shifts with age — and links a later breakfast time later in life to depression, fatigue, oral health problems and even a modestly higher risk of early 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,” said lead study author Hassan Dashti, a nutrition scientist and circadian biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dashti’s team analyzed data, including blood samples, from nearly 3,000 UK residents with an average age of 64.
Participants were questioned about their meal and sleep habits, so the researchers could calculate the time between when they woke up and ate breakfast, between dinner and bedtime and between breakfast and dinner.
On average, the participants had breakfast a half-hour after getting up and dinner five hours before hitting the hay.
Breakfast typically came at 8:22 a.m., lunch at 12:38 p.m., and dinner at 5:51 p.m.
The participants were tracked for over 20 years, with the researchers noting that each additional decade of aging led to a delay in breakfast and dinner by at least a few minutes.
“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,” the researchers wrote this week in the journal Communications Medicine.
Research has shown that consistently eating later can negatively affect your 24-hour biological clock, leading to blood sugar spikes and higher levels of stress hormones.
Over the two-decade follow-up period, over 2,300 deaths were recorded.
The researchers calculated that the late-eating group had 10-year survival rates of 86.7% compared to 89.5% in the early-eating group.
They noted that people who struggled to get adequate sleep and prepare meals were often in the late-eating group.
“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 said.
“Also, encouraging older adults in having consistent meal schedules could become part of broader strategies to promoting healthy aging and longevity.”
The researchers acknowledged that the study has limitations.
Their data collection did not capture the participants’ snack habits outside traditional meal times or their levels of physical activity.
Also, most of the participants were unemployed women, so the conclusions may not translate to a more diverse population.
Still, Dashti said the findings help fill a “gap by showing that later meal timing, especially delayed breakfast, is tied to both health challenges and increased mortality risk in older adults.”
He added: “These results add new meaning to the saying that ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day,’ especially for older individuals.”
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