Have you ever wondered why identical twins can develop different diseases?
Take, for example, the hypothetical twins Bob and Jim. Bob eats a diet of sugary, low-fiber food and doesn’t get much exercise. Jim, on the other hand, runs every morning after eating a bowl of oatmeal and drinks red wine in moderation.
You can probably guess that Bob’s lifestyle puts him at a higher risk of certain types of cancer and diabetes. But why? He and Jim share the same DNA after all.
It’s because we are the product of both what our genes do and how they do it. The sequence of our genes can directly change from exposures like sunlight and smoking. But there are also exposures that don’t change our genes and still manage to impact our health.
This is due to a phenomenon that evolved eons ago to help organisms adapt to their environment: Epigenetics. Your epigenome consists of molecular instructions that can silence, tweak or activate your roughly 20,000 genes depending on the exposures you accumulate over time, such as from nutrition, toxins or pollutants.
Read more at forbes.com