Early birds have long basked in the glory of health superiority, sometimes even tinged with a hit of moral righteousness. It’s easier for them to snooze at night and rise with the sun, allowing them to tick through their to-do list, maybe knock out a self-care routine or morning workout, before night owls even drag themselves out of bed. And a new study just granted them even more aura points: Researchers found that older adults who maintained an early breakfast time as they aged were at less risk of dying during a roughly 20-year period than those who pushed back that morning meal over time.
The study followed nearly 3,000 older folks in the United Kingdom who filled out questionnaires at various points during the study period, recording lifestyle details like their typical meal and sleep timing, as well as any symptoms of physical and psychological illness they were experiencing. Some of them also did blood testing, allowing researchers to track who among them had certain genes linked with having an evening chronotype (a.k.a. night owl tendencies). To no surprise, the night-owl people tended to eat all their meals at later times. But more illuminating were the consistent associations the researchers found between mealtimes and health outcomes: Delaying breakfast was linked with depression, higher levels of fatigue, and greater frequency of illness and, yep, mortality risk.
Further stacking the evidence in favor of an early breakfast, the researchers also pinpointed two general clusters of participants: an early-eating group that had breakfast around 7:50 a.m. and a later-eating group that had their morning meal at 8:50 a.m. And it turned out, the earlier-eaters had a higher survival rate than the later-eaters. In fact, when the researchers crunched the numbers, they found that with each hour later that participants ate breakfast, they had an 11% increased risk of dying during the study period.
It’s worth noting, studies like this one can only prove correlation, not causation—so it might be that health issues pushed some participants to eat breakfast later, rather than a delayed breakfast causing them to be worse off, health-wise. That change in meal timing among older adults “could be an easy marker, something that a family member could even pick up on, of an underlying health condition,” lead author Hassan Dashti, PhD, RD, a nutrition scientist and circadian biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, tells SELF.
But at the same time, Dr. Dashti holds that a consistent, early breakfast may have a positive effect on health and longevity, particularly by sharpening the circadian rhythm. As we age, that rhythm gets blunted, which can have a negative ripple effect on various body systems. A routine morning meal “is a strong environmental cue that tells your body it’s daytime,” Dr. Dashti says, “which signals each of your organs to shift from evening functioning into daytime mode.” That helps keep everything chugging along in optimal form.
This isn’t the first study to suggest the importance of breakfast for living a long life—research has shown that regularly eating a morning meal is linked with lower overall and heart-related mortality (and that bypassing it can up your heart-disease risk).
