Economic Times
As we age, our daily routines often shift, bedtimes get earlier, and meals become more irregular. But a new study suggests that one small change in your schedule could have a big impact on your health and longevity, the timing of your breakfast.
Researchers at Mass General Brigham and their collaborators have found that older adults who delay breakfast may face higher risks of serious health problems, including depression, fatigue, poor sleep, and even early death. Their findings, published in Communications Medicine, suggest that when you eat, especially your first meal of the day, it could be a simple but powerful signal of your overall health. More
OTOH, intermittent long term fasting is supposed to have many good health effects.
I am 73 and since age 70, I have become a “martyr to my digestive system I have a hiatis(sp?) hernia and must had small meals and avoid animal fats. I have no problem with breakfast and so am eating a good one about 6:30 am everyday. I am very leery of dinners, am I going to have an episode of intense gastric pain? On the plus side, I am losing weight because I am scared to eat.
I’m wondering how much damage I’m doing to myself having that bowl of cold cereal almost every morning.
JMM
Have you tried any protein drinks? They have some of them they are marketing as complete meals.
JMM… have your doctors pulled a liver enzyme test after one of these episodes? Just curious.
I’d probably be better served if I ate breakfast and then had my first cup of coffee.
I often wake up hungry and make a cup of coffee and upon drinking some find myself no longer hungry.
I shit at the same time every morning so I’m good.
I cannot stomach breakfast. It nauseates me to even think of eating before noon. But sometimes — rarely — if I have to take a medicine “with food”, I try to find the most swallowable thing I can eat, like plain yogurt or a banana.
(I’m pretty sure this aversion to breakfast started when I was in AF basic training, where they run you around a track at 6:00 a.m. The base chow hall was located at the first turn and there’s nothing more nauseating than the smell of frying sausage wafting over the hot Texas air at that hour; when your defenses are at their lowest.)
Sorry, i have zero trust in ‘research’ these days.
Who sponsored it? Perkins or Jimmy Deans?
Eating is the only pleasure I have left. I’ve had a hiatal hernia since 2001. I eat whatever I want. I take a lot of supplements. Look into digestive enzymes and pro/prebiotics. Can’t think what else off the top of my head. Watch vids on YouTube by Dr Berg.
Yay! Another study! Did I have to pay for this “research.” No mention of WHAT those people were eating. I’m pretty certain that’s more significant than timing.
My grandfather and grandmother are both 97 and still cook their own food and live at home. His advice to me as a teenager was eat like a king in the morning and like a prince in the evening. I have followed his advice all these years and have been able to maintain my ideal weight with only sporadic exercise and a very busy lifestyle.
Anonymous…Dr Berg ? That dude is a huuuuuuuge Scientology nutjob
Another stupid article that doesn’t link to the actual study and even in this misleading write-up that omits lots, not only confuses the direction of causation, but implies a causation from a correlation.
This researcher has done multiple articles for years along these lines, funded by drug companies. Here’s one:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002916522005688
“…Participants were recruited from a weight-loss program in Spain… Late eaters had higher BMI… higher concentrations of the satiety hormone leptin in the morning… Our results suggest that late eating is associated with cardiometabolic risk factors and reduced efficacy of a weight-loss intervention…”
From this latest, which I had to hunt for, subsidized by NIH:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-025-01035-x
“We analyzed data from 2945 community-dwelling older adults from the University of Manchester Longitudinal Study of Cognition in Normal Healthy Old Age, with up to five repeated assessments of meal timing and health behaviors conducted between 1983 and 2017…
“Conclusions: Meal timing, particularly later breakfast, shifts with age and may reflect broader health changes in older adults, with implications for morbidity and longevity…
“The 10-year survival rate was 86.7% for the late group compared to 89.5% for the early group… [Don’t get too underwhelmed here]
“Morbidity may contribute to changes in meal timing among older adults… Although the observational design cannot establish directionality, it is more likely that the onset of disease leads to shifts in meal timing rather than shifts in meal timing contributing to the onset of disease…
“A major strength of this study is the repeated assessment of meal timing in a large cohort of community-dwelling older adults (though most participants had only two assessments given the aging nature of this older adult cohort)… [in HOW many years?!?… and loads of “weaknesses” in the study.]
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You don’t hate the media enough. And we really need to cut down on the crap NIH is funding with our tax dollars.
^^^DC You don’t know what you’re talking about.