A massive 34-year-long study just provided us with some insight into a minute detail about elderly life that could foreshadow an early demise, and it all has to do with our breakfast habits.
The later you eat breakfast in old age, the more likely you are to die early. Now there is a fear-mongering headline if I’d ever seen one. Still, according to researchers across multiple countries, publishing their findings in Communications Medicine, this longitudinal study followed nearly 3,000 adults in the UK, aged 42 to 94, from 1983 to 2017, and found that every hour you delay breakfast later into the day increases your risk of death by 8 to 11 percent.
This means that morning fasters, who delay food intake for hours at a time in the name of good health, may actually be hastening their own demise if they’re doing it in their elderly years.
Here’s the weird part: eating late isn’t necessarily killing you; it’s probably the other way around. As health issues creep in with age, like insomnia, chronic pain, mobility struggles — all the stuff that makes you roll your eyes when your parents and grandparents complain about it — it gets harder to wake up, let alone scramble some eggs. So breakfast gets pushed back, not because people are lazy, but because they’re unwell.
In other words, this means that they’re not dying early because they are eating late. They’re eating late because they’re dying. It’s hard to find the will and desire to eat when everything hurts.
The study revealed that older adults tend to shrink their eating window, often down to late breakfast, early dinner, and done. It sounds like intermittent fasting, and it is, technically, but it’s involuntary, in this case. It correlated with poorer physical and mental health.
Essentially, the later you eat, the more likely your body is already on the down slope. The research suggests that tracking when someone eats—especially breakfast—might help identify those at greater risk before things spiral.
If you’ve got any elderly folks in your life, or are one yourself, keep tabs on their (or your) morning eating habits. When that morning appetite starts to go away, maybe start paying a little bit more attention to what your body is telling you, and then try to relay that information to a doctor. There might be something going on.
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