A recent longitudinal study by an international team of researchers has suggested a link between eating breakfast later in the day and a greater chance of an early death among elderly people, raising questions about the relationship between mealtimes and illness.
The scientists said it’s not just the food we eat that affects our health and well-being – the the time we eat is also known to affect our body’s functioning.
And yet, reports Science Alert, our body’s condition can also determine when we may be craving a bite.
For the research, data from 2 945 adults living in Newcastle and Manchester in the United Kingdom were collected between 1983 and 2017. The participants were aged between 42 and 94 when they signed up, and information was collected through optional questionnaires on their health, lifestyle and eating habits.
The statistics revealed they tended to eat breakfast and dinner later in the day as they aged, extending their daily eating over a smaller window of time, too. These later eating times were linked to poorer physical and mental health.
When it came to all-cause mortality – the likelihood of dying for any reason – the researchers, which also involved teams from Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States and the University of Manchester, UK, found a significant link between eating breakfast later and a higher mortality risk. For each hour later that breakfast was taken, the chance of dying during the study period went up 8%-11%.
“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 nutrition scientist Hassan Dashti, from Harvard Medical School.
The researchers aren’t saying that eating breakfast later is going to cause you to die at an earlier age – or that shifting your breakfast time forward a few hours will guarantee you get an extra few years added on at the end of your life.
In fact, they suggest the relationship may be driven in the other direction. As we get older and a greater number of health problems mount up, and increase in severity, that causes later breakfast times.
Poorer health can lead to a lack of sleep, with trouble sleeping leading to difficulty getting up. Deteriorating physical health also means most tasks – including making breakfast – take longer too.
“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,” Dashti said.
“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.”
The world’s population is ageing overall, meaning a larger proportion of the total number of people on the planet are older, which makes it increasingly important to spot and interpret these kinds of patterns.
“Patients and clinicians can possibly use shifts in mealtime routines as an early warning sign to look into underlying physical and mental health issues,” said Dashti.
“Also, encouraging older adults to consistent meal schedules could become part of broader strategies to promoting healthy ageing and longevity.”
The research was published in Communications Medicine.
Study details
Meal timing trajectories in older adults and their associations with morbidity, genetic profiles, and mortality
Hassan Dashti, Chloe Liu, Hao Deng, Anushka Sharma, Antony Payton, Asri Maharani & Altug Didikoglu.
Published in Communications Medicine on 4 September 2025
Abstract
Background
Older adults are vulnerable to mistimed food intake due to health and environmental changes; characterising meal timing may inform strategies to promote healthy ageing. We investigated longitudinal trajectories of self-reported meal timing in older adults and their associations with morbidity, genetic profiles, and all-cause mortality.
Methods
We analysed data from 2945 community-dwelling older adults from the University of Manchester Longitudinal Study of Cognition in Normal Healthy Old Age, with up to five repeated assessments of meal timing and health behaviours conducted between 1983 and 2017. Linear mixed-effects models, latent class analysis, and Cox regression were used to examine relationships between meal timing with illness and behavioural factors, genetic scores for chronotype and obesity, and mortality.
Results
Here we show older age is associated with later breakfast and dinner times, a later eating midpoint, and a shorter daily eating window. Physical and psychological illnesses, including fatigue, oral health problems, depression, anxiety, and multimorbidity, are primarily associated with later breakfast. Genetic profiles related to an evening chronotype, but not obesity, are linked to later meals. Later breakfast timing is also associated with increased mortality. Latent class analysis of meal timing trajectories identify early and late eating groups, with 10-year survival rates of 86.7% in the late eating group compared to 89.5% in the early eating group.
Conclusions
Meal timing, particularly later breakfast, shifts with age and may reflect broader health changes in older adults, with implications for morbidity and longevity.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Longer sleep, early breakfast, affects BMI – Spanish study
‘Night owls’ at higher risk for diabetes than ‘early birds’ – US analysis
Late dinner and not eating breakfast raises heart attack risk