Overview

• An international team led by Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School analyzed meal timing, health and genetics in roughly 3,000 UK adults aged 42 to 94 over more than two decades, with results published in Communications Medicine.
• Each additional hour of delayed breakfast was associated with a higher risk of death, with news coverage citing about a 10% increase per hour and a 10-year survival of 89.5% for earlier eaters versus 86.7% for later eaters.
• The authors stress the study is observational and recommend treating shifts in meal schedules as a simple marker that could prompt checks for underlying physical or mental health issues.
• Later breakfasts frequently coincided with depression, fatigue, oral health problems, sleep difficulties and life changes such as retirement, living alone or entering assisted living.
• With aging, breakfast and dinner times shifted modestly later on average (about eight and four minutes per decade), and genetic tendencies toward an evening chronotype were linked to later eating.