So let’s say you’ve been eating nuts your whole childhood. You have had nuts added to different types of food. Your body has been exposed to nuts for quite a while.
What changes, for you to suddenly wake up one day and be allergic to nuts?
In: Biology
This definitely doesn’t cover all allergies that develop later in life, but one mechanism would be when a previously tolerated antigen (like a protein from a peanut) is modified in some way (e.g. by some sort of abnormal chemical reaction in your body) such that your body no longer recognises it and views it as foreign. This could happen for multiple reasons:
1. You’re currently taking medication which either binds to the peanut allergen in a process known as haptenization or chemically modified it otherwise.
2. For allergens on the skin, they can be modified by UV light.
3. A bunch of other mechanisms I don’t know off the top of my head
It also has to do with other factors, such as the integrity of your body’s barriers to infection like your skin and the overall state of your immune system at the time of exposure to the allergen. If you have breaches in your skin, a concurrent infection (a cold or something), and the allergen is introduced through that breach (maybe a papercut on your hand) then your body may misinterpret the allergen as arriving in the context that a pathogen usually would.
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