Autumn Advantage
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If you were born in the autumn, we have some surprising good news for you. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and you're listening to the Weather Notebook.

It turns out that people born in the fall tend to live a few months longer than those born in the spring. A team at the Max Planck Institute in Germany discovered this striking seasonal difference. They looked at birth and death records for more than a million people born before 1950 in three countries: Austria, Denmark, and Australia.

They discovered that people born in the fall tended to live an average of four to seven months longer. Spring babies had an extra chance later in life of getting chronic heart, lung, and digestive trouble, as well as pneumonia and the flu.

What's the most likely reason for the autumn advantage? According to the Max Planck scientists, it's the food our mothers ate while we were on the way. Fetal nutrition plays a big role in our later health. It used to be that pregnant women had a hard time getting fresh food in the dead of winter. This was long before oranges and cantaloupes graced our supermarkets year round. Even vitamins weren't available until midcentury. This nutritional difference could have given autumn babies a benefit from the summer produce their mothers ate. So, the longer ago you were born the stronger the autumn advantage.

Nowadays the seasons have less influence over how people eat. So at least in the developed world, the autumn advantage may shrink with the babies of the new millennium.

Today's contributing writer is Bob Henson, of Boulder Colorado, who was born in July, which he says doesn't make a difference one way or the other. Our program is brought to you by the Mount Washington Observatory through funding by the National Science Foundation and Subaru, the beauty of all-wheel drive. Extra thanks today go to Executive Engineer Sean Doucette, Producer Margaret Landsman, and Assistant Producer Doug Sanborn.