Meal Timing May Shift With Aging, Is Linked to Health Changes

Physical and psychological illnesses, such as fatigue, depression, anxiety, mainly associated with later breakfast

By Elana Gotkine HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, Sept. 5, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Meal timing changes with age and may reflect health changes in older adults, according to a study published online Sept. 4 in Communications Medicine.

Hassan S. Dashti, Ph.D., R.D., from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and colleagues examined longitudinal trajectories of self-reported meal timing in older adults and their associations with health outcomes using data from 2,945 community-dwelling older adults. Between 1983 and 2017, participants had up to five assessments of meal timing and health behaviors conducted.

The researchers observed associations for older age with later breakfast and dinner times, a later eating midpoint, and a shorter daily eating window. Associations with later breakfast were seen for physical and psychological illnesses, including fatigue, oral health problems, depression, anxiety, and multimorbidity. Links were seen for later meals with genetic profiles related to an evening chronotype, but not obesity. An association with increased mortality was also seen for later breakfast timing. Early and late eating groups were identified by latent class analysis of meal timing trajectories; 10-year survival rates were 86.7 and 89.5 percent in the late and early eating groups, respectively.

“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,” Dashti said in a statement. “Patients and clinicians can possibly use shifts in mealtime routines as an early warning sign to look into underlying physical and mental health issues.”