Your genes play a major role in determining your height, hair and eye color, and skin tone, but they don’t tell the entire story of who you are. Your environment is incredibly important in shaping your personality, your likes and dislikes, and your health. In fact, your diet, social interactions, exposure to pollution, physical activity and education often exceed the influence of genetics on many of the features that define you.
Figuring out how your genes and environment increase your likelihood of developing asthma, heart disease, cancer, dementia and other conditions can have life-changing consequences. The field of genomics has made it relatively straightforward to test both in the hospital and at home for a wide range of genetic variations linked to disease risk.
