Could the food we eat and the air we breathe be damaging our immune systems? The number of people with autoimmune diseases, from rheumatoid arthritis to type 1 diabetes, began to increase around 40 years ago in the west. Now, some are also emerging in countries that had never seen the diseases before.

Ian Sample speaks to genetic scientist and consultant gastroenterologist James Lee about how this points to what western lifestyles might be doing to our health, and how genetics could reveal exactly how our immune systems are malfunctioning.

“A western diet is certainly probably one of the factors that is contributing to this, but we don’t know exactly what components of the western diet are specifically responsible. It would be a huge oversimplification to just point our fingers just a diet because we know that things like pollution and smoking and obesity and stressed are also undoubtedly contributing to this, and the real challenge is the exact thing that’s driving different diseases,” [explained Lee.]

…

“Irrespective of all of these things, the biggest risk factor for developing pretty much any of these diseases is actually genetic. So, if you’re not particularly genetically predisposed to getting an autoimmune disease, any of the triggers that might set off a disease in someone else will almost certainly have no effect on you at all,” [Lee said.]

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