
Food allergies get curiouser and curiouser  - cwan
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327191.300-food-allergies-get-curiouser-and-curiouser.html?full=true
======
icey
This is called Oral Allergy Syndrome:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_allergy_syndrome>

For most of my life I've thought I was allergic to melons and cucumber.

As it turns out, I'm allergic to ragweed pollen. By way of allergy shots for
the ragweed pollen, I'm finding myself not nearly as sensitive to either
melons or cucumber.

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ericb
I had the idea the other day that perhaps increasing allergy prevalence is a
side effect of women taking birth control. Taking birth control causes women
to prefer mates with a major histocompatibility complex that is similar to
their own, as opposed to different. I'm wondering if allergies are the result
of violating nature's usual preference in this regard.

I'm just a layman, so feel free to correct or scoff at the plausability of my
pet theory.

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=birth-
contr...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=birth-control-
pills-affect-womens-taste)

~~~
zngtk4
For the record, not all scientists accept the research regarding birth control
and mate preference as sound science. There's not even good evidence that
humans can detect (even unconsciously) the MHC genotypes of another person
(most of the papers don't show a statistically significant effect), which the
referenced paper takes as one if its premises.

In addition, in the paper referred to in the article, there isn't a lot of
difference between those on the pill and off (the error bars tended to
overlap):

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18700206?ordinalpos=1&...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18700206?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum)

It was also not a random or blind trial: "allocation to the pill/control group
was entirely the decision of the volunteers, not the experiments."

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viggity
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis>

The Hygiene Hypothesis is the theory that fewer infectious agents you
encounter as a child will boost the chances you'll have allergenic problems.
The reasoning behind this is that your immune system isn't getting the same
inputs or "training sets" as they would have 200 years ago. Since it isn't
getting primed with actual infectious material, your immune system starts
reacting adversely to silly things like pollen, peanuts, etc.

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madcaptenor
The passenger with the severe nut allergy was named Hazel?

(And are there any other names for people which are also names for nuts?)

~~~
there
from seinfeld:

 _You know what I love? How there's two nuts named after people: Hazel and
Filbert._

~~~
billswift
Interesting bit of trivia - Filberts and hazel nuts are different names for
the same plant.

~~~
joshu
That means that there's one nuts named Hazel and Filbert.

