What causes allergies?
Allergy is one of the most common immune pathologies today. It already affects more than 30% of the population against only 3% in the 1960s!
Wrongly trivialized, allergy is an inappropriate reaction of the immune system against an antigen, even in minimal quantities. Intense and / or dangerous symptoms manifest it.
In normal individuals, this same antigen causes no reaction.
Allergies are considered manifestations of immune hypersensitivity.
Although that sounds not very frightening, these immune hypersensitivities are actually immune system disorders.
You can think about it like an army dysfunction, where the soldiers, no longer really knowing who the enemy is, set out to fight against false intruders who pose no danger to the country.
Some allergies are reasonably recoverable, but others may stick around for life, as is often the case with allergies mediated by IgE (antibodies of the Immunoglobulin E group).
Allergies mediated by IgE are well known to everyone. They are part of the severe forms of allergy.
They can make the throat and face swell (angioedema), induce choking, severe asthma attack, collapse, giant urticaria and anaphylactic shock.
How does it work and what causes them
Before you can be allergic to something, it has to be detected as an enemy by the immune system. On the first contact with the antigen, the antigen abnormally activates the immune system, which recognizes it as an enemy.
It is on the second contact with this antigen that the allergic reaction is triggered with all the serious symptoms just described, and so on for all future contacts with it.
Anything that harms the immune system can directly or indirectly cause an increased risk of allergies.
Among the sources of harm to the immune system, three are directly related to the increased risk of allergy:
- Eating foods with pesticides, or any other chemical that can cause part of that food to appear antigenic to our immune system
- Eating GMO foods, because introducing foreign proteins, genetically modified, can make part of this food appear antigenic to our immune system
- Introduce proteins from this food into our muscles, tissues or blood, without going through the digestive system. This is what happened for example with peanut oil, which contains traces of peanut protein used as an adjuvant in vaccines
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