If you ask somebody to create a list of traditional autumn activities, raking leaves, picking apples, hiking, camping, and trick-or-treating will probably be included. Eating more food than normal probably won’t.

But it probably should.

Research has determined that on average people eat 222 calories more per day in the fall than in the spring. In an article Michael Greger, M.D., wrote for NutritionFacts.org — the website he founded “to improve public health by providing the latest in evidence-based nutrition and health research in an accessible format” — Greger explains this increase can’t be attributed to colder temperatures “since we eat more in fall than in winter.”

But the fact that fall precedes winter can be; in fact, it’s a significant factor for this discrepancy.

For avoiding starvation is a “primary driver” in human evolution, and winter is the most likely time for this to happen, so our caveman ancestors became genetically programmed to prepare for it and would eat all they could in the fall. Since that genetic programming’s still in place — our DNA is a 99.7-percent match with a caveman’s — we eat more in the fall.

But we do it unnecessarily, to protect ourselves against “the deprivation of winter [that] no longer comes.”

In light of that, it would seem to make no sense to go against genetics and go on a diet just as the days get shorter and shorter. But regardless of when the sun rises and sets, what really makes no sense is a misbegotten notion too many people hold.

That a diet is something you “go on,” and the only reason to go on it is to lose weight.

While a diet can indeed be used for that, it’s important not to forget what the word diet primarily means: the selection of foods you habitually eat. So even though the fall may not be the prime time to adopt a diet with the intention of losing weight, it’s as good a time as any to improve the quality of yours.

For while there’s no doubt that losing weight when you need to helps your health, what’s just as true is that improving your diet does far more than create weight loss. According to the UnitedHealthcare website, it will lower the risk of serious disease, provide additional energy (even though you’ll probably eat fewer calories), permit deeper sleep, aid the immune system and eye sight, strengthen bones and teeth, lessen the pain in joints, and sharpen the mind.

All of which, it stands to reason, will allow you to age better — which essentially is the conclusion of a study published in the April 2026 issue of Aging Cell. Titled “Short-Term Dietary Intervention Alters Physiological Profiles Relevant to Ageing,” it took 104 people between the ages of 65 and 75 who were non-smokers and non-vegetarians with no serious health complications or food allergies and had them follow one of four diets for four weeks.

Two of the diets were omnivorous, with one of being high in fat (between 37 and 41 percent) and low in carbs (between 41 and 43 percent). The other was high in carbs (53 percent) and low in fat (between 28 and 29 percent).

Two were “ semi-vegetarian,” meaning mostly vegetarian fare with about 30 percent of the protein being animal-based. Both of these diets followed the same high-fat, low-carb or low-fat, high carb pattern as the omnivorous ones.

All four diets received the same overall percentage of calories from protein, and all 104 participants received all meals via a food delivery program. One important note about the study that shows it wasn’t designed for weight loss is that participants were instructed to eat as much as they wanted and were deliberately provided with an excess of food so that they could do so.

The most important note about the study is that through the assessment of 20 different aging biomarkers — things such as measuring blood levels of cholesterol, triglycerides, insulin and C-reactive protein (which is used to assess the degree of inflammation in the body) — the researchers discovered the participants who ate the high-carb omnivorous diet had a “statistically significant” drop in biological age from the beginning until the end of the four-week study. (In the scientific world, the term statistically significant means it’s rather unlikely an outcome occurred by chance.)

Those who ate either of the semi-vegetarian diets also showed a reduction in biological age, just not enough to be deemed statistically significant. Those who ate the high-fat omnivorous diet — the diet the researchers felt was most like the typical American’s — “showed no meaningful changes.”

And while the researchers still consider it to be “an open question” as to “whether these changes represent meaningful shifts in ageing biology or transient physiological fluctuations,” they do stress that their findings “align with broader literature linking high-fibre, plant-forward diets to lower inflammation, improved metabolic function and reduced age-related disease risk.”