Professor Constance Hilliard's
GENOMIC HISTORY & HEALTH
Blog
A genomic historian searches for gene variant clues to health disparities in the ancestral history of populations.
Understanding the link
between high risk diseases and ancestral background:
America is not only a multi-racial nation. It is a multi-genomic society as well. Our society is made up of demographic populations, whose ancestors were genetically adapted to a diversity of food sources, climactic conditions, altitudes, geographical conditions and pathogens.
However, modern medicine demands a level of precision that goes far deeper than common perceptions of race. Most African-Americans, for instance, are lactose-intolerant,
but such is not the case for many East Africans, for which dairy foods are a major food source. Because recent immigrants to the U.S. from Africa come from that continent's high-sodium coastal cities, they Will seldom exhibit the high rates of hypertension and kidney disease found in African-Americans of Slave descent. The latter's ancestors were kidnapped and dragged in chains 500 to 1 ,000 miles from the low-sodium interior to the Slave ships along the Atlantic coast.
In this era of precision medicine, we Will not find breakthroughs using the current antiquated one-size-fits-all approach. Why? It is because it quietly universalizes data
relevant to populations of European ancestry and misapplies it to all humans.
Find out more about the latest research explaining the need for nutritional approaches to high risk diseases in the african-american community, including:
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CERTAIN TYPES OF CANCER (click to enlarge)
The most persistent African-American health disparities emanate from the traumas imposed by history, institutionalized racism and healthcare inequities. But from time to time we find cases where the culprit is, in fact, America's one-size-fits-all medical paradigm. While it may see itself as being universal, its methods are narrowly attuned to the biological needs of Americans with European DNA.
