I hate how my allergies make me seem like a republican.

[carrots@toot.community]

@futurebird you have my sympathy. I’m sensitive to gluten, but much much worse for me is Xanthan Gum and this is used in most gluten free products. I do my own triage.

[adrake@sfba.social]

@futurebird I have a fun one! Something that likes to grow on (or is produced by something that grows on) temperature-abused cooked meat dishes. Eat a dish and it's fine, eat the leftovers that weren't fridged until a couple hours later than ideal, and there's a small chance I get anaphylaxis from it. Took years to figure out the pattern because there was no shared ingredient among the triggers!

I started being a real hardass about either keeping the food hot/refrigerating the leftovers promptly, and not eating meat leftovers unless I was confident that those had occurred (even at some risk of offending someone that I didn't trust their food handling). Still rarely got it from restaurants. Started vetting restaurants by checking to see if they had a pattern of food holding temperature violations on their health inspection reports and it's been a good number of years since my last reaction. Still carry epi-pens, of course.

Would love to know the actual trigger, but at least I figured out how to avoid it!

[adrake@sfba.social]

@futurebird (no other allergies, food or otherwise)

[burnitdown@beige.party]

@aburka @aredridel@kolektiva.social @futurebird that's how peanut allergies exploded after it was discovered that some people have a peanut allergy. it doesn't necessarily explain the allergy itself.

two things i see being major factors in developing various allergies: parents who smoked indoors, and outdoor air pollution from burnt fossil fuel exhaust. i know a few people who have either been allergic to everything as a child or are still that allergic now, and their parents were heavy chain smokers. this is not unknown to medical science.

[llewelly@sauropods.win]

@futurebird evolution: It can't work miracles, it just does the best that it can.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@carrots

That gluten/xanthan gum thing is a bit like how so many places, especially schools are very proud of how they replace peanut butter with "sun butter"

One day there was a dish of "peanut noodles" ... "oh no we'd never use peanuts! it's sunbutter... no one uses peanuts at a school. Allergies!"

It **said** peanuts, that's why I ate it.

I was just like "It was nice knowing everyone. Goodbye."

(Three epi pens and a trip to the ER. They now label better. )

[kateshaw@mastodon.social]

@futurebird I know someone who's incredibly allergic to carrots. She can't eat out because no one believes it's a real allergy, and carrots are in so many foods.

[gbsills@social.vivaldi.net]

@futurebird My oldest kid has the apple peal problem. They made her mouth itch.

[hi_cial@donphan.social]

@futurebird you cant do hummus??? tragic :(

[dancingtreefrog@mastodon.social]

@futurebird
My spouse is allergic to jalapenos. A LOT of vegan foods are spiced up with jalapenos!

[wharrrrrrgarbl@an.errant.cloud]

@futurebird @aredridel it's both. Immune development is a contingent process that involves genes you're born with, random modification of those genes to generate cells which produce a variety of immunoglobulins, and then selection of those cells based on a balance of self-reactivity and environmental reactivity to determine what exactly makes the adaptive immune system you face the world with. Lots of places it can go wrong, or at least inconvenient.

[cassiopeia12727@fandom.ink]

@futurebird @geonz Some people blame the fact that I have celiac disease on glyphosates and GMOs. Nope, my condition has existed since ancient times. Also, no eating gluten-free is not healthy or a miracle cure if you don't have a medical need to avoid gluten, and, no, it won't magically make you lose weight.