This simple breakfast timing trick could be your key to a longer, healthier life

A new study shows that eating breakfast earlier in the day may help people live longer, as per the study led by Dr. Hassan Dashti, Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School. Researchers tracked nearly 3,000 adults between ages 42 and 94 for about 30 years using University of Manchester data, published in Communications Medicine journal.

The study found that the timing of meals, especially breakfast, could be as important as the food itself and may even signal underlying health problems. As people get older, they tend to delay breakfast and dinner, which shortens the total time they spend eating each day, as per the report by FoxNews.

Breakfast timing and health problems

This change in eating time is often connected to poor sleep, depression, dental problems, fatigue, difficulty cooking, or lifestyle changes such as retirement, living alone, or moving into assisted care, said Dashti to Everyday Health. For example, depression and low energy can make mornings slower, while dental or chewing problems can make eating hard, causing people to delay breakfast.


Because the study only observed people, the researchers cannot prove these health problems cause late breakfasts, but they noticed they often happen together, he added. On average, every 10 years of life led to breakfast being pushed back by 8 minutes and dinner by 4 minutes, FoxNews reported.

Early breakfast and longer life

Over 22 years of follow-up, 2,361 participants died. People who ate breakfast earlier had a 10-year survival rate of 89.5%, while late eaters had 86.7%. Each additional hour of breakfast delay was linked with a higher risk of death. The difference was modest but statistically significant, according to Dashti, as stated by FoxNews.

Cravings late in the day and even night were shown to contribute towards depression, anxiety, fatigue, and poor oral health, with even breakfast timings being a critical marker of how the food habits of the day would pan out, researchers said. Work on ‘chrononutrition’ is being advanced in order to have a better understanding of human circadian rhythms.

The studies also debunk a lot of myth which surrounds the current trend of skipping breakfast altogether, with experts like Dr. Dashti saying that at least for older population, the conventional wisdom of breakfast being the ‘most important’ meal of the day still holds true. A report by Fox News also suggested that younger bodies might react better to intermittent fasting and lesser amounts of meals per day, as at the end of it all, a regular consistency in your eating schedule is more important.

FAQs

Q1. Why is eating breakfast early good for health?
Eating breakfast early is linked to longer life, better health, and lower risk of death, as shown in a decades-long study.

Q2. What happens if you eat breakfast late every day?
Eating breakfast late is tied to higher death risk and health issues like depression, fatigue, and poor oral health, researchers found.