Unless someone swipes one of President Trump’s used forks from the Mar-a-Lago dining room and sends it to 23andMe for DNA analysis, the world will simply have to guess what the White House physician meant when he told reporters on Tuesday that Trump “has incredible genes, I just assume.”
“Incredible genes” may seem like hand-waving, but there’s no question some genetic variants protect against heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and other killers. And Trump chose his parents well: His father died of pneumonia at 93 after developing Alzheimer’s disease but apparently avoiding cancer and heart disease. His mother lived to 88; her cause of death was not reported, but her only known ailment was osteoporosis.
His genetic inheritance might explain how Trump can get by with only four or five hours of sleep, which supposedly raises the risk of hypertension, and yet have blood pressure of 122/74 without anti-hypertensive medication. (At 71, Trump is in the age group for which the systolic target, the first number, is 130.)
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