Researchers studied changes to meal timing in older adults and discovered people experience gradual shifts as they age. They also found characteristics that may contribute to mealtime shifts and revealed specific traits linked to an earlier death.

Results from the Mass General Brigham study are published in Communications Medicine

“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 author Hassan Dashti, a nutrition scientist and circadian biologist at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School.

“Patients and clinicians can possibly use shifts in mealtime routines as an early warning sign to look into underlying physical and mental health issues. Also, encouraging older adults in having consistent meal schedules could become part of broader strategies to promoting healthy aging and longevity,” Dashti said.

Dashti and his colleagues — including senior author Altug Didikoglu of the Izmir Institute of Technology in Turkey — examined key aspects of meal timing that are significant for aging populations to determine whether certain patterns might signal, or even influence, health outcomes later in life. The research team analyzed data, including blood samples, from 2,945 community-dwelling adults in the UK aged 42–94 years old who were followed for more than 20 years. They found that as older adults age, they tend to eat breakfast and dinner at later times, while also narrowing the overall time window in which they eat each day.

Later breakfast time was consistently associated with having physical and mental health conditions such as depression, fatigue, and oral health problems. Difficulty with meal preparation and worse sleep were also linked with later mealtimes. Notably, later breakfast timing was associated with an increased risk of death during follow-up. Individuals genetically predisposed to characteristics associated with being a “night owl” (preferring later sleep and wake times) tended to eat meals at later times.

“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,” said Dashti. “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. These results add new meaning to the saying that ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day,’ especially for older individuals.”

Dashti noted that this has important implications as time-restricted eating and intermittent fasting gain popularity, where the health impacts of shifting meal schedules may differ significantly in aging populations from those in younger adults.

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health.