Meal Timing and Eating Window with All-Cause and Cardiovascular Mortality and Life Expectancy: Population-Based Cohort Study

Meal timing and eating window with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality and life expectancy: population-based cohort study

The impact of meal timing and eating window on mortality and life expectancy remains unclear. This cohort study included 31,044 adults aged 40 years and older from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1999–2018. The meal timing and the eating window were estimated from a 24-h dietary recall. During a median (IQR) follow-up of 8.6 (4.5–13.0) years, 7129 deaths were documented. Compared with a first meal within 7:00–8:00, the hazar…

Older adults following earlier meal schedules had a 10-year survival rate of 89.5%, compared with 86.7% among later eaters—but Harvard and Mass General researchers say breakfast drifting later may be less a cause of declining health than one of its earliest visible warning signs.

A difference of 2.8 percentage points separated two groups of older adults in a long-running British cohort. Ten years into the survival analysis, 89.5% of people whose eating schedules followed the earlier pattern were alive, compared with 86.7% of those in the later pattern. The figures come from a 2025 study in Communications Medicine led by Hassan S. Dashti of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The team repeatedly rec…