Most people think about what to eat for breakfast, not when to eat it. Yet, new research suggests timing may be a powerful habit for a longer life. A major study in Communications Medicine followed almost 3,000 older adults for more than 20 years and focused on exactly this question. The team, led by Hassan S. Dashti at Massachusetts General Hospital with collaborators in Manchester and Turkey, mapped how breakfast times changed as people aged. They then linked those shifts with illness patterns, genetic profiles, and survival. Their findings suggest that the timing of your breakfast in the morning may signal your underlying health. It could also become one of the simplest longevity habits for older adults who want practical, sustainable changes.
Why Researchers Now Focus on When You Eat
For decades, nutrition science focused almost entirely on what and how much people eat. However, a newer field called chrononutrition studies how meal timing interacts with the body’s internal clocks. In their introduction, Dashti and colleagues note that “chrononutrition, the study of the timing of eating, has emerged as a modifiable risk factor for adverse health outcomes.” These internal clocks influence hormones, digestion, temperature, and sleep.
When food is consumed at times that clash with those rhythms, your metabolism can become less efficient. Reviews in the journal Nutrients emphasize that the timing of meals plays a crucial role in metabolic health, not only total calories. Public health agencies are beginning to echo this concern. At a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute workshop, epidemiologist Nour Makarem explained that “we need to pay more attention to when, not just what, we eat.” That shift in focus sets the stage for asking whether simple timing choices, such as when breakfast happens, might count among everyday habits for longer life.
Inside the Long Running Study
The work on breakfast timing and longevity comes from the University of Manchester Longitudinal Study of Cognition in Normal Healthy Old Age. This cohort, often called UMLCHA, began in the 1980s and recruited 6,375 adults aged 42 to 94 from northern England. For the new analysis, Dashti and colleagues examined 2,945 community-dwelling adults who provided repeated information on meal and sleep timing. Participants answered questions like “What time do you eat breakfast?” up to 5 times between 1983 and 2017. They also completed detailed questionnaires on symptoms, lifestyle, and mood, and a subset provided blood samples for genetic testing.
The researchers used linear mixed models, latent class analysis, and Cox regression to describe trajectories of meal timing and link them with illness and mortality. Mortality data came from England’s NHS Digital death registry, which allowed the team to track survival over more than 10 years for many participants. This design makes the paper one of the most informative studies so far on how everyday eating patterns relate to longevity habits in older age.
How Breakfast and Dinner Times Change as We Age
The study confirms something many people may have already noticed for themselves. Meal times drift as people grow older. Dashti’s team found that ageing was associated with later breakfast times, later dinners, and a delayed midpoint between those meals. At the same time, the length of the daily eating window became shorter. On average, participants ate breakfast about 30 minutes after waking, but this gap widened with age. Reported clock times for breakfast and dinner moved later over the decades of follow-up. This pattern suggests that the internal and external changes of later life push eating into a narrower, shifted window. Retirement, changing sleep, and health issues all play roles.
From a chrononutrition perspective, this is important because the body handles nutrients differently across the day. Reviews in Nutrients report that earlier eating usually aligns better with insulin sensitivity and glucose control. If older adults increasingly push meals toward the biological evening, those shifts may strain metabolism. Over time, such timing patterns could influence which habits for longer life actually help, and which ones quietly undermine resilience. News-Medical’s summary of the work notes that “chrononutrition is the study of the timing of eating, which has emerged as a modifiable risk factor for adverse health outcomes.”
Later Breakfast, More Illness
One of the most striking findings in the paper is how strongly eating breakfast later is linked with illness. Using the Cornell Medical Index, the team tracked symptoms across many body systems, from digestion to mood. Later breakfast timing was consistently associated with more physical and psychological health problems, including fatigue and anxiety, as well as multimorbidity scores. Oral health issues also stood out. Older adults who reported dental problems or difficulties chewing were more likely to eat breakfast later. The same was true for people who reported trouble preparing meals or a low mood.
These patterns suggest that a delayed first meal often reflects real issues, not simply preference. Harvard’s summary of the study underlines this point, reporting that “later breakfast time was consistently associated with having physical and mental health conditions such as depression, fatigue, and oral health problems.” Basically, breakfast time may act as a visible tip of a much larger iceberg. Spotting these shifts early on may help clinicians support older adults before problems escalate, which makes breakfast timing a practical lens on longevity habits in everyday life.
Night Owls and Genes
The researchers also wanted to know why certain people drift toward later meals. To explore this, they calculated polygenic scores related to evening chronotype and obesity in the genotyped subset. These scores summarize many small genetic variants linked either with being a “night owl” or with higher body mass index. Dashti’s team found that higher evening chronotype scores were associated with later breakfast and dinner, as well as a later eating midpoint. In contrast, genetic risk for obesity did not meaningfully explain who ended up eating later. This suggests that biology pushes some people toward delayed schedules, especially those who naturally prefer late sleep and wake times.
However, genes were not the only factor. The Harvard Gazette piece on the study notes that difficulty with meal preparation and poor sleep also tracked with later meals. Life circumstances, work history, and caregiving duties likely play important roles. For habits for longer life, that means timing advice needs to respect both biological tendencies and real world constraints. People with strong evening preferences may need support that focuses more on consistent schedules and earlier light exposure, instead of rigid early breakfasts that feel impossible. As BBC Science Focus noted, “later meal timing, especially delayed breakfast, is tied to both health challenges and increased mortality risk in older adults.”
Late Breakfast and Mortality
The most headline-grabbing result concerns survival. Using latent class analysis, the team identified distinct “early” and “late” eating groups based on trajectories of breakfast and dinner timing. Over the next decade, survival was 89.5% in the early group and 86.7% in the late group. In Cox regression models adjusted for age, sex, and key health factors, later breakfast timing was associated with a higher risk of death from any cause. The summary from the paper states that “eating breakfast later with aging was linked to a higher risk of death.” The effect size is modest, yet it persisted even after accounting for many potential confounders.
Other outlets have tried to quantify this for the public. A health.com summary, based on interviews with the authors, reports that each hour of breakfast delay may raise mortality risk by roughly 8% to 11%, although exact hazard ratios vary by model. The authors stress that this pattern shows association, not firm causation. However, as part of a broader picture, it strengthens the case that breakfast timing could join established longevity habits as a useful clinical signal.
How Breakfast Timing Connects to Longevity Habits
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The breakfast study does not exist in isolation. Several large reviews already link breakfast skipping with higher risks of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. A 2025 review by Reytor-González and colleagues in Nutrients concludes that frequent breakfast skipping appears to be an independent, modifiable risk factor for cardiometabolic disease. Taken together, this background and the new Communications Medicine study suggest a practical pattern. Eating earlier in the day and avoiding very delayed first meals aligns with better metabolic profiles in many groups.
For older adults, an early, consistent breakfast can fit alongside other habits for a longer life, such as regular movement and good sleep. It anchors the day, supports appetite, and may reduce the temptation for heavy late-night eating. Clinicians are also beginning to think about how to turn this into guidance. In the Harvard write-up of the study, Dashti suggests that shifts in mealtime routines could act as an “early warning sign” that clinicians can use when assessing older patients. Asking about breakfast timing, therefore, becomes more than casual conversation. It becomes a structured way to spot emerging risks during a short visit.
Intermittent Fasting and Popular Longevity Trends
Time-restricted eating and other intermittent fasting approaches have become popular longevity habits in recent years. Many protocols encourage people to skip breakfast and consume meals in a compressed afternoon or evening window. Yet most of those trials involve middle-aged adults with overweight, not very old adults with multiple conditions. The new data from Dashti’s group suggest that, for older adults, a routine late breakfast might be a red flag instead of a clever hack. People with low appetite, frailty, or dental problems may not compensate for skipped morning calories later.
They can slide into unintentional weight loss and muscle loss, which directly harms survival. Authors of a viewpoint in the Australian Journal of General Practice caution that timing interventions needs careful individualisation in older patients, since nutrition is highly personal and comorbidities are common. This does not mean time-restricted eating is always harmful. However, it does suggest that younger and older bodies respond differently. For someone in their 70s, a slight move toward earlier and more regular breakfasts may be a safer longevity habit than aggressively extending fasting windows. As Devlin and Heilbronn write, “when we eat is the crucial missing puzzle piece in practice.”
Using Breakfast Timing as a Simple Daily Health Check
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So how might an older adult or caregiver use these findings in daily life? The researchers are careful not to prescribe a single “best” time that fits everyone. Instead, they highlight patterns that may support healthy ageing. Eating breakfast within a reasonable window after waking, and keeping that time relatively stable from day to day, seems helpful. From a practical standpoint, one habit for longer life could be a simple self-check. Notice whether breakfast is gradually drifting later over months, especially if energy feels lower or mood feels worse.
A persistent shift could prompt a conversation with a doctor or dietitian about sleep, oral health, medication side effects, or depression. In this way, breakfast time becomes a signal, not just a preference. Dashti and colleagues emphasize that meal timing may serve as a “simple marker of health in older adults” rather than a magic bullet. Used alongside other information, such as weight changes and activity, it can help clinicians detect problems earlier. For families, gently supporting an earlier, more regular first meal can be a small, concrete way to care for loved ones who want to age well.
A Morning Habit with Big Implications
The Communications Medicine study led by Hassan S. Dashti and collaborators offers a clear message. As people age, breakfast and dinner drift later, the eating window narrows, and those who continue delaying breakfast tend to accumulate more health problems and face slightly higher mortality risk. Chrononutrition research now indicates that timing is not a cosmetic detail. It interacts with circadian rhythms, hormones, and behaviour in ways that influence long-term health.
Public health experts like Makarem argue that this means widening our view of diet to include when we eat, not only what is on the plate. For individuals seeking realistic longevity habits, breakfast timing offers a rare combination of simplicity and scientific backing. It costs nothing, fits easily into daily routines, and can work alongside other strategies such as movement and social connection. Eating earlier will never replace medical care. However, paying attention to when that first meal happens may help the body’s own clocks stay in tune for longer, healthier years.
Disclaimer: This article was created with AI assistance and edited by a human for accuracy and clarity.
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