Episode
Ep. 175: Your Genetics Are Talking To You, Here’s How To Listen with Dr. Sam Shay | Genetics | Genetics Testing | Diet and Genes | Inflammation | Chronic Illness
- Published
- Jun 11, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3030
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://shetalkshealth.com/podcast/
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/she-talks-health-thyroid-health-tips-functional-medicine-hashimoto-s-hypothyroidism-gut-health-hormones-holistic-healing-2981396/episodes/ep-175-your-genetics-are-talking-to-you-here-s-how-to-listen-with-dr-sam-shay-genetics-genetics-testing-diet-and-genes-inflammation-chronic-illness/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/she-talks-health-thyroid-health-tips-functional-medicine-hashimoto-s-hypothyroidism-gut-health-hormones-holistic-healing-2981396/ep-175-your-genetics-are-talking-to-you-here-s-how-to-listen-with-dr-sam-shay-genetics-genetics-testing-diet-and-genes-inflammation-chronic-illness.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Can genetics explain chronic gut issues, thyroid symptoms, inflammation, and why one person can “eat poorly” and feel fine while another does everything right and still struggles? What if your best diet depends on your genetic carb tolerance, plus things like caffeine and histamine sensitivity? On this episode of the She Talks Health Podcast, I sat down with Dr. Sam Shay to talk about how functional genetics can validate what you’ve probably felt in your body for years and give you a practical roadmap forward. We started things off with Dr. Shay’s story of being really unwell as a child, and how that pushed him to seek out his own information about his health. As a kid, he struggled with things like years of crippling insomnia, violence in school, and developing a caffeine habit at only 6 years old. His desire to find answers about his health struggles led him to specialize in genetics and train other practitioners in this modality. Later, we got into the details of what our genetics really tell us about our health. We discuss that inflammation is a major driver of chronic illness, and that “bad genes” are often really an environmental mismatch with evolutionary tradeoffs. So if you’re feeling as though you’re chronically inflamed but are doing everything “right”, your genetics might be the missing piece to the puzzle here. Your genetics can even tell you about how well you digest carbs, and who does better with lower vs higher carb diets. If you’ve ever tried a diet that made you feel completely messed up but didn’t know why, this could explain a lot for a lot of people. We also touched on genes related to caffeine-induced anxiety/depression, histamine sensitivity, and why Dr. Shay focuses on testing “drivers of disease” (like inflammation, free radicals/mitochondria,…