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FT Press

It Takes a Genome: How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick
Greg Gibson

013713746X / 9780137137466
Available now

Read the following excerpt from
It Takes a Genome…

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Human beings have astonishing genetic vulnerabilities. More than half of us will die from complex diseases that trace directly to those vulnerabilities, and the modern world we’ve created places us at unprecedented risk from them .In It Takes a Genome,Greg Gibson posits a revolutionary new hypothesis: Our genome is out of equilibrium, both with itself and its environment. Simply put, our genes aren’t coping well with modern culture. Our bodies were never designed to subsist on fat and sugary foods; our immune systems weren’t designed for today’s clean, bland environments; our minds weren’t designed to process hard-edged, artificial electronic inputs from dawn ‘til midnight. And that’swhy so many of us suffer from chronic diseases that barely touched our ancestors.