Health Issues That Have Plagued The Property Brothers' Family

It's no secret that HGTV's Property Brothers, Jonathan and Drew Scott, are very health conscious. One quick look at the celebrity twins' daily diets makes it abundantly clear that they like to take care of themselves. "I don't do a lot of fried foods, fast food, or junk," Jonathan told Yahoo Health in 2015, with Drew adding, "I restrict dairy, gluten, and refined sugar intake." But while an apple a day may keep the doctor away, certain ailments are not so easily dispatched — something other members of Jonathan and Drew's family know all too well.

For starters, there's the illnesses that long plagued Jonathan and Drew's older brother, JD Scott. In a July 2019 Instagram post, JD revealed that he had spent the previous several months suffering from a mysterious disease that frustratingly defied a clear diagnosis. Not only were simple things like walking slightly more than normal or being outside in moderately warm temperatures enough to make JD debilitatingly ill, but, as he told People shortly after the initial social media post, there was a point where he was legitimately concerned that he might not make it. "I needed to go to the hospital ... I took some time to write out detailed instructions for what to do in case I died that night," he shared.

Luckily, doctors were finally able to narrow down exactly what was going on and give JD proper treatment. In a follow-up Instagram post made in September 2019, the eldest Scott sibling revealed that he had been diagnosed with fluoroquinolone toxicity (a side effect of antibiotics), as well as acute mercury poisoning.

Another member of the "Property Brothers" family who has publicly dealt with health problems is Linda Phan, Drew Scott's wife. As Drew told People in April 2022, these issues were at the forefront of his and Phan's uphill battle toward conceiving their first child, which took a toll on them both. "Linda has thyroid issues, she has Graves' disease, so trying to understand what we had to do to get to a point where we could even consider conceiving, that was the biggest challenge," he said.

In an unfortunate coincidence, Jonathan's own famous fiancée Zooey Deschanel similarly has health concerns the couple has to take into account regarding her day-to-day life. More specifically, the "500 Days of Summer" star suffers from a suffers from a gluten intolerance, reportedly as a result of celiac disease. 

Deschanel also learned as a child that she has ADHD — and has spoken candidly about not only getting that diagnosis, but her opinions regarding the allegedly much more lax process of being diagnosed as an adult. "The thing is, is like, you have a neuropsych when you're a kid and you ... need to be diagnosed, because it's a whole thing," Deschanel said on the "Armchair Expert" podcast in December 2025. "And you have to take a really long test. It's like multiple days of testing, and then they diagnose you with — with that and usually other learning differences."