Food allergies get curiouser and curiouser | Hacker News Reader

Food allergies get curiouser and curiouser

newscientist.com

36 pointscwan11 comments

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.

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...

Well a more diverse histocompatibility complex is supposed to make for a stronger immune system and an allergy is described as an immune overreaction... but yeah I also have no idea what I'm talking about.

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&...

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."

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.

The passenger with the severe nut allergy was named Hazel?

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

Mr. Peanut?

Edit: Come on, people! That was hilarious! :)

from seinfeld:

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

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

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

If you allow surplus consonants, you could get quite a few, eg. Pete Nut, Walt Nut, Koko Nut, Mac Adam Yanut, Ke Shu Nut.

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