Why do we still have allergies if humans have lived around plants for a long time?
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Hygiene hypothesis:
Our immune system has coevolved with many nasty critters all trying to harm our body throughout human existence. It has developed many weapons to counter the invaders since many of the invaders (bacteria, viruses, parasites) were quite deadly.
In the past hundred years, many of those nasty critters no longer affect us. We don’t live out in nature anymore. But the immune system still has memory of the past, along with its arsenal of weapons. Your immune system still fights as if its in a war zone.
There is evidence that this contributes to allergies and autoimmune diseases.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2841828/
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