[Med Page Today]
Skipping breakfast or eating late at night should top the not-to-do lists of men in middle age and beyond; not only do they have metabolic effects, they may also put men at higher risk for coronary heart disease, researchers found.
Over a 16-year period, male health professionals who said they regularly skipped breakfast were 27% more likely to die, according to Leah Cahill, PhD, of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and colleagues, who adjusted for diet, demographics, physical activity, television watching, and amount of sleep.
And those who said they ate late at night were 55% more likely to die.
Both relationships, however, fell shy of statistical significance after further adjustment for body mass index, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and diabetes, “suggesting that eating habits may affect risk of coronary heart disease through pathways associated with these traditional risk factors,” they reported online in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.