Early Breakfast Could Help You Live Longer
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
news.harvard.eduResearchstory
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Longevity
A Harvard study suggests that eating breakfast early may be associated with longer lifespan, sparking discussion about the relationship between meal timing and calorie intake.
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Sep 8, 2025 at 3:27 PM EDT
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(1) people who want to reduce their calorie intake usually find not eating breakfast or delaying the first meal is easy (your metabolism is already geared around using stored energy) whereas reducing the size of dinner or eliminating it is difficult and if I tried the latter I wouldn't sleep at all that night
(2) the scientific literature unanimously says that eating breakfast is a good thing
A cynical person might think that the breakfast food industry is threatened by (1) and funds research for (2) and if it were just a few results I'd be inclined to think so but there are so many studies and the results are so consistent I don't know what to think.
There's a similar situation around caffeine which is highly addictive and should be cardiotoxic based on its mechanism (there are very few drugs targeting adenosine metabolism because... they tend to make you die) but nothing harmful about caffeine ever really sticks. For that matter, there's the strange thing that cannabis is so much more benign (no seizures) than any synthetic cannabinoids.