It’s not just plants that change when the snow melts.
It’s normal to experience some changes with our body as the seasons change, but according to a study published in Nature Communications, the spring season could actually impact you more than you think.
Alka Gupta, co-director of the Integrative Health and Wellbeing program at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian, says that other than seasonal allergies, the changes in “temperature, humidity, daylight, barometric pressure and more” all have a contributing effect that, when lumped together, can have a great impact on us. And in terms of seasonal changes, it turns out that the winter to spring transition introduces the biggest changes to our body.
Aside from physical changes, our bodies also experience the so-called epigenetic changes, which refer to external modifications in genes turning them “on” or “off.” Gupta says, “If we’re shifting a quarter of our genes just based on seasons, we could see how that could really profoundly impact health.”
“It’s not something we talk about so much and it’s definitely not something that we fully understand, but there is definitely science and evidence behind the idea that some illnesses get worse and happen more frequently in some seasons and happen less frequently in others,” she adds. “In general, many illnesses are worse in the winter and in general many people tend to be a bit healthier during the summer months.
