why are allergies becoming more common and why can you randomly develop them later in life?
In: Biology
Nobody knows. There are theories, one being that we are too hygienic in the west.
We know that people from the third world have far fewer allergies, and when they come here, they develop them. It’s obviously something in our environment.
My hypothesis is that we develop allergies based on exposure to pathogens and similar proteins in pathogens being present in foods. We get exposed to a lot of pathogens via vaccines, and while exposure to any of those pathogens can cause an allergy to form, we get all of them in a controlled dose. It’s definitely a worthwhile trade off imo and I’d much rather my kid have a soy allergy than polio, and most people don’t get allergies from them anyways. But that’s just my non doctor take on it based on a lot of somewhat unrelated evidence.
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