What can I learn from my genes?

Why should I care about my genes?

This is something that I hear a lot!

People often think that their genes ‘are what they are’ and that knowing more about them doesn’t change anything. 

The key here is to understand your genetic variants so you can personalize your diet and prioritize lifestyle choices. 

There are so many nutrition gurus and doctors on TV and the web that seem so sure their solutions are right for you. You know what I’m talking about — the guy on YouTube in the tight t-shirt telling you to eat more saturated fat or the other guy with a white coat on TV  telling you to never eat saturated fat. 

Hypothetical situation:

One health guru claims that drinking carrot juice is all you need to do. This will give you all the vitamin A you need — keeping you healthy, thin, and able to leap tall buildings. 

You buy the juicer he’s selling and drink gallons of carrot juice. A year later you notice that your skin is orange, your night vision isn’t great, and you can’t leap tall buildings. 

What’s going on? Time for another example.

I like to break down using genetic data into a couple of different compartments:

• optimizing diet (do I need carrots or liver?)
• preventing diseases (am I at risk for diabetes?)
• finding the root cause for things that plague me

Disease Prevention:

Let me give you a quick example of preventing diseases. One completely preventable genetic disease is hemochromatosis, which is caused when too much iron builds up in the body and damages the organs. Eventually, this can lead to liver failure, diabetes, pancreatitis, joint pain, and more. 

Normally, the body tightly regulates iron absorption, but mutations in the HFE gene can cause you to absorb too much iron from foods. 

For someone with an HFE mutation, giving blood is an easy way to reduce iron and keep it from damaging organs. Simply knowing that you have the genetic mutation can help to prevent all the complications from storing too much iron.