Jeffrey Bland interviews Dr. Eric Schott about genetic resilience: why people with disease-linked genes don't always get sick. Diet, lifestyle, stress, and environment can modulate whether genetic risks actually show up in your body.
As you know, I'm so excited every month in Functional Medicine Update to have the opportunity to introduce and to interview a new clinician or researcher of the Month. And such is certainly the case for the July 2014 edition in which I have the fortune, fortuitously I might add, of interviewing an author of one of the premier articles in this month's journal Science, which is one of the preeminent science journals. That's Dr. Eric Schott. He co authored an article with Dr. Steven Friend entitled Finding the Resilient and what is the Resilient and what is it all about? And how does it relate to our gene expression and our susceptibility to disease? And when we get our gene analyzed and it gives us risk factors to disease, how does that relate to the appearance in our phenotype, meaning in how we look and feel of disease? And I think that's the essence of this month's Clinician of the Month in July of 2014 when Dr. Schott tells us about why it is that some of these characteristics that are locked into our genes are never expressed into our phenotype. That just because we have the risk in our genes to diabetes or heart disease or arthritis or dementia does not mean that it will be penetrant into the phenotype and not express itself as a disease in older age. It is other factors that regulate its appearance. And it's those other factors that he will talk about in our July issue. It's just absolutely fascinating for me to see that we are not determined when the sperm met the egg. There are many things that will cause variability in the expression of of how these characteristics are seen in our health and disease patterns. And in fact, as he will point out, one of the most dominant contributing factors to these regulatory factors that control the resilience of the organism to these risk factors is none other than our diet, our lifestyle, stress patterns and environment. The things that we talk about in the Disease Delusion, the book that I recently authored, the things that we talk about for decades now in Functional Medicine Update. So I think you're going to enjoy Dr. Schott's interview very, very much. It was extraordinarily motivating to me because it once again shows that we have a lot more control over our health than we ever thought possible when we learned Mendelian genetics.
