The New New
The Next Big Thing in Health Is Your Exposome
From sewer sludge to mosquito repellant, one scientist is exploring how daily exposures determine our health
Our health is a combination of genetics and environment. Maybe someone’s genes make them vulnerable to high blood pressure, for example, but by watching what they eat — in effect, controlling their body’s environment — they can keep their numbers within normal levels.
Right now, we know a lot about the genetics side of this combination, as an explosion of research has yielded incredible detail about people’s genetic profiles. We also have insight into how our internal bacterial environments — the microbiome — impact our health. But the environmental piece of the puzzle is still fuzzy. We don’t measure all the chemicals we encounter each day, from the microscopic fungi on a walk to the car exhaust on a highway.
That is, most people don’t.
Michael Snyder, a Stanford biologist and pioneer in genomics, does. For the past several years, Snyder has been wearing a device he invented that measures the environment around him. It’s part of his quest to learn how the environment impacts our health by studying what he calls people’s “exposomes,” or the various air particles…
