Breakfast timing and death risk: An international team has reported a connection between eating breakfast later in the day and a higher risk of death among older adults, adding fresh nuance to how meal timing relates to health.
The longitudinal study followed 2,945 adults in Newcastle and Manchester, UK, from 1983 to 2017. Participants were 42–94 at enrolment and completed optional questionnaires on health, lifestyle, and eating habits. As people aged, they tended to delay breakfast and dinner and compress their daily eating into a narrower window, patterns that were tied to poorer physical and mental health.
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Crucially, each hour’s delay in breakfast was associated with an 8–11% increase in all-cause mortality risk over the follow-up period. “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 Hassan Dashti, a nutrition scientist at Harvard Medical School.
The authors emphasised that the results are associational, not causal. They suggest that the direction of effect may often run the other way: declining health can disrupt sleep and slow morning routines, which pushes breakfast later, and this same decline in health also raises mortality risk. Poor sleep, mobility limitations, and the time required to prepare food may all contribute.
Even so, the team says shifts in mealtime routines could help clinicians flag emerging health issues in older adults and supports encouraging consistent meal schedules as part of healthy ageing strategies. The findings were published in Communications Medicine.
