As people grow older, both the type and quantity of food they eat often change. Yet one dimension of eating behaviour—when meals are consumed—remains less well understood. A new study led by researchers at Mass General Brigham has shed light on this question, revealing that meal timing gradually shifts with age and that these changes may carry significant implications for health and survival. The findings, published in Communications Medicine, suggest that specific patterns of eating are linked to increased risk of illness and even earlier death.
The research team, led by Hassan Dashti, PhD, RD, a nutrition scientist and circadian biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, discovered that monitoring mealtime habits, particularly breakfast timing, may provide an accessible marker of overall health in older adults. “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 Dashti. “Patients and clinicians can possibly use shifts in mealtime routines as an early warning sign to look into underlying physical and mental health issues. Encouraging consistency in meal schedules could also be an important part of strategies to promote healthy ageing and longevity.”
Dashti and colleagues—including senior author Altug Didikoglu, MSc, PhD, of the Izmir Institute of Technology—set out to determine whether evolving patterns of meal timing might signal, or even shape, health outcomes later in life. Drawing on data from 2,945 community-dwelling adults in the UK, aged 42 to 94 and followed for more than two decades, the researchers tracked both eating behaviours and health status. They found that, with advancing age, people tend to eat breakfast and dinner at progressively later hours, while also reducing the overall length of their daily eating window.
The timing of breakfast, in particular, proved to be revealing. Later breakfasts were consistently associated with poorer health outcomes, including depression, fatigue, sleep disturbances and oral health problems. Difficulty preparing meals was also linked with delayed eating. Most strikingly, individuals who shifted their breakfast later into the day faced a higher risk of death during the follow-up period. Genetic predisposition also played a role: those with traits associated with being “night owls” tended to adopt later mealtime schedules.
Until now, little was known about how meal timing evolves in later life or how such shifts relate to long-term health. According to Dashti, these results fill a significant gap. “Our findings help show 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,’ particularly for older individuals.”
The implications are especially timely, given the growing interest in time-restricted eating and intermittent fasting. While these approaches have shown promise in younger populations, the study suggests that shifting meals to later in the day may have very different consequences for older adults. In other words, dietary strategies cannot be applied uniformly across age groups: the health effects of when we eat appear to change as we age, highlighting the need for age-specific recommendations around meal timing.
More information: Hassan Dashti et al, Meal timing trajectories in older adults and their associations with morbidity, genetic profiles, and mortality, Communications Medicine. DOI: 10.1038/s43856-025-01035-x
Journal information: Communications Medicine Provided by Mass General Brigham
