Category: 8. Health

Your breakfast routine—or lack of one—may have lasting consequences for your bones.

A massive new Japanese study found that skipping breakfast and eating late dinners were each linked to a higher risk of osteoporotic fractures. The findings add to growing evidence from the field of chrononutrition—which explores how the timing of meals interacts with the body’s internal clock—suggesting that when you eat may matter for long-term health, not just what you eat. For example, researchers have linked eating earlier in the day to better cholesterol levels, lower insulin resistance and less body fat, all of which support the idea of eating in line with your natural circadian rhythm.

That potential connection matters because fragile bones are already a widespread problem. Roughly 13% of U.S. adults age 50 and older have osteoporosis, a disease that weakens bones and makes them more likely to break. Another 43% in the same age group have low bone mass, often called osteopenia. Taken together, more than half of older Americans are living with reduced bone strength and a higher risk of fractures.

Lifestyle habits like exercise, alcohol use and smoking are well known to influence fracture risk. What hasn’t been studied much is whether the timing of meals makes a difference. This study is one of the first to look at how skipping breakfast or eating late dinners might influence fracture risk. The results were published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society.

How Was the Study Conducted?

Researchers analyzed health records from nearly 1 million Japanese adults who took part in routine checkups. The study followed people age 20 and older, linking their lifestyle questionnaires with medical records from a large national claims database. On average, participants were tracked for about 2.6 years.

They focused on two self-reported eating habits: skipping breakfast and having a late dinner. The team tracked 4 types of osteoporotic fractures—hip, forearm, spine and upper arm—and compared people who reported these behaviors and who did not.

What Did the Study Find?

During the study, researchers logged just over 28,000 major fractures. People who skipped breakfast more than three times a week were about 18% more likely to break a bone than those who ate it regularly. Eating dinner within two hours of bedtime more than three times a week was linked to an 8% higher fracture risk.

The study also reinforced what health professionals already know—women, people with lower body weight and older adults are more prone to fractures. It also showed that meal timing habits often traveled with other choices like smoking, drinking, getting less exercise and sleeping less. Put together, the results suggest that lifestyle plays a big role in bone health—and that something as simple as when you eat may add to the risk.

How Does This Apply to Real Life?

Meal timing alone won’t make or break your bones, but it may be worth paying attention to. Starting the day with breakfast gives you a steady supply of nutrients your bones can use. Even simple options like yogurt with fruit, eggs on whole-grain toast or a smoothie made with milk and leafy greens provide protein and calcium without much effort.

Dinner habits matter too. Leaving two to three hours between your last meal and bedtime gives your body time to digest and aligns eating with your natural rhythms. Pairing that with regular weight-bearing exercise—like light strength training—and getting enough sleep helps reinforce bone strength over time.

And if you’re concerned about protecting your bone health, try to incorporate nutrients like calcium, vitamin D, protein and healthy fats into your diet. (Canned salmon can be a great source of all four.) 

Our Expert Take

This recent study in the Journal of the Endocrine Society doesn’t prove that skipping breakfast or eating late dinners directly cause fractures, but it highlights how everyday routines may add up in ways we’re only starting to understand. The foundation for bone health is still the same—nutrient-rich foods, physical activity, quality sleep and limited smoking and alcohol—but meal timing may be another piece of the prevention puzzle.

Busy moms might be sending their babies the wrong signal if they feed evening breast milk that was expressed in the morning, a new study suggests.

The composition of breast milk changes throughout the day, including hormones thought to influence babies’ wake/sleep patterns, researchers reported Friday in Frontiers in Nutrition.

A mother might unintentionally disturb her infant’s rest if she stores breast milk in the morning and then provides it in the afternoon or evening, researchers warned.

“Breast milk is a dynamic food: Consideration should be given to the time it is fed to the infant when expressed breast milk is used,” lead researcher Melissa Woortman said in a news release. She’s a recent doctoral graduate in nutritional sciences of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

“The timing of these cues would be particularly critical in early life, when the infant’s internal circadian clock is still maturing,” senior investigator Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, a professor in biochemistry and microbiology at Rutgers, said in a news release.

Doctors consider breast milk a baby “super food” that is chock full of vitamins, minerals and compounds that help build the young immune system and feed the growing body, researchers said.

It’s widely thought to be the best source of infant nutrition, but many moms aren’t able to directly breastfeed multiple times throughout the day and night. Instead, they use a pump to express and store milk for later feedings.

For the study, researchers took 10 milliliter breast milk samples from 21 women at specific intervals on two days, roughly a month apart: 6 a.m., noon, 6 p.m. and midnight. Another 17 participants provided one day’s worth of samples taken at the same times.

Researchers analyzed the samples for levels of three hormones: melatonin, cortisol and oxytocin. Melatonin and cortisol are involved in regulation of wake/sleep cycles.

The breast milk samples also were analyzed for levels of immunoglobulin A, an antibody protein produced by the immune system, and the milk protein lactoferrin. These influence the baby’s digestive system.

Results showed that melatonin and cortisol varied over the course of a day. Melatonin peaks at midnight, while cortisol is highest in the early morning.

“We all have circadian rhythms in our blood, and in lactating mothers, these are often reflected in breast milk,” Woortman said. “Hormones like melatonin and cortisol follow these rhythms and enter milk from maternal circulation.”

The other breast milk components were mostly stable throughout the day. This might be because they aren’t as strongly influenced by signals dictating circadian rhythms, researchers said.

The results suggest that moms should try to feed their expressed milk to reflect the time when it was gathered and stored, researchers said.

“Labeling expressed milk as ‘morning,’ ‘afternoon,’ or ‘evening’ and feeding it correspondingly could help align expressing and feeding times and preserve the natural hormonal and microbial composition of the milk, as well as circadian signals,” Dominguez-Bello said.

For busy moms, that adjustment stands to be a practical one, Woortman said.

“In modern societies where it may not be feasible for mothers to stay with their infants throughout the day, aligning feeding times with the time of milk expression is a simple, practical step that maximizes the benefits of breast milk when feeding expressed milk,” she concluded.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about the benefits of breast feeding.

Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

After a month with no H5N1 avian flu detections in dairy cattle, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) today reported a positive test involving a herd from Texas, raising the nation’s total since early 2024 to 1,079 infected herds in 17 states.

The detection is Texas’s first since May.

Also, APHIS reported another H5N1 outbreak at a commercial turkey farm, the second recent detection in South Dakota. The new report involves a facility in Beadle County that houses 52,600 birds. Other outbreaks in turkeys over the past week occurred in flocks in Faulk County, South Dakota, and in Dickey County, North Dakota.

Source of California child’s H5N1 infection still a mystery

In related news, investigators from California and their partners at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) yesterday published their investigation findings into one of two unexplained H5N1 infections in California children. They published the details in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The school-age child’s symptoms included fever, muscle pain, abdominal pain, and conjunctivitis (“pink eye”). They began on December 13, 2024, lasting 1 week and involving two healthcare visits. 

The first visit was at a local emergency department, where staff collected a nasopharyngeal sample that tested positive for influenza A and was sent to the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s lab as part of enhanced surveillance. Further subtyping identified H5N1 on January 9, and follow-up sequencing revealed that the virus belonged to the B3.13 genotype that had been circulating in dairy cattle, other mammals, poultry, and wild birds.

No other family members had been sick, and polymerase chain reaction and serology testing of some of the child’s close contacts revealed no evidence of human-to-human spread. A sample collected from the child on January 10 was still positive, but specimens collected 4 days after that were negative.

Poultry not likely the cause

The family lived in an urban environment and had a pet dog. A family member had bought raw poultry at a live-bird market more than 2 weeks before the child’s symptoms began. It was cooked and eaten the same day. Investigators wrote that poultry wasn’t the likely source, given that poultry-market testing was negative, the child wasn’t exposed to raw poultry, and the parents weren’t sick. The investigators said the child spent time outdoors at school and may have had environmental exposure to the virus.

The researchers said continued surveillance and real-time subtyping at public health labs is a key part of novel flu surveillance and that detection of B3.13 serves as a reminder that the virus continues to transmit across susceptible species, requiring a strong One Health approach.

(Vax-Before-Travel News)

French Polynesia, located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, has been a dream vacation destination for decades.

However, these islands are also home to dengue fever, which is transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes.

According to Bulletin de surveillance sanitaire de Polynésie française n°34, published on September 2, 2025, there were 22 new dengue cases (19 confirmed last week.

And the blue alert for DENV-1 remains in effect.

Since November 2023, a total of 2,577 cases have been recorded.

To alert international travelers of this health risk, the U.S. CDC’s Travel Health Advisory issued on August 21, 2025, included French Polynesia.

The CDC identified the island groups of the Society Islands (Tahiti, Moorea, and Bora Bora), the Marquesas Islands (Hiva Oa and Ua Huka), and the Austral Islands (Tubuai and Rurutu).

The CDC reported that these countries are experiencing higher-than-usual numbers of cases and have identified a higher-than-expected number of dengue cases among U.S. travelers returning from those countries. 

While a second-generation dengue vaccine is available in various countries, it is not offered in the USA.

Fortunately, several dengue vaccine candidates are conducting late-stage research focused on preventing all four virus types from infecting people.

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