Comment on "Gluten Free" has officially gone too far.
sxan@midwest.social 3 months agoThis is why you don’t get nuts when traveling on an airplane carrying a passenger with a nut allergy. Allergic responses vary wildly. You might have a mild allergy that gives you a rash if you east too much of something. Or, you might go into anaphylactic shock if you breath air that’s had nuts in it.
My wife has an autoimmune disease that’s triggered by foods. Some foods more than others, and there’s some tolerance to each. She shouldn’t eat capsicum, but she loves spicy food, and she can eat some, but it she eats it too often, she gets a response flare. OTOH, she can’t have any amount of dairy: the response is rapid, and severe, and she has to take steroids to get it under control. Luckily, she’s not sensitive to anything (that we’ve found, anyway) that triggers a response from the molecules in the air.
Oh, there are two things you may have forgotten: first, when you smell something, you’re literally tasting molecules of that thing; second, your skin is your body’s largest organ, and you can absolutely ingest stuff through your skin. That’s how Novichok, and other nerve agents, work.
MissJinx@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Yeah that was 100% a stupid question, but one of those things I never thought about before
sxan@midwest.social 3 months ago
Oh, hey @MissJinx; I haven’t seen you in a while.
I don’t think it was a stupid question; frankly, it’s not something I find intuitive. I have to stop and think about it. Also, living with someone with allergies makes you more aware of them, since your brain tends to purge knowledge you don’t use. I’d think it’s a curse - especially since my memory is shit to begin with - except that I know a couple of people with eidetic memories, and that can present its own problems.
I know one guy with an eiditic memory who has a problem with information that he learns wrong the first time. He has to build a sort of linked-list model in his brain for corrections, and then do a sort of very slow O(n) crawl of the list to end up with the right result. So say he’s introduced to you and they say your name is Becky; that gets stored in his memory. Then you correct them and say your name is “Susanne”, so he makes a “correction” link. But because someone coughed when you said it, he heard “Susan”, and that was w what got stored; so he has to make a second correction. From then on, whenever he runs into you he has to go through this “Becky” -> “Susan” -> “Susanne” process, and he says it’s real slow and can take a couple of seconds, and longer if there are more corrections. That seems a poor trade-off to me for being able to glance at a page and then repeat it back verbatim by reading the picture in his memory.
MissJinx@lemmy.world 3 months ago
yes. Celiac disease is usually the one thing we hear people talk about when they can’t eat gluten, so I never thought about alergies with shock response
sxan@midwest.social 3 months ago
I admit, I made that assumption when I read “gluten”, too.
Thing is, back in oelden days, people with these sorts of allergies wouldn’t survive long enough to procreate. We’re breeding a species of increasingly fragile people - but that’s what is best about us, IMO: we take care of our weak. With any luck, gene editing will get to the point that it doesn’t matter what genetic defect you were born with; we’ll just tailor a cure, and everyone will have a chance.
It surprises me there’s a non-cyliac gluten allergy; gluten is what allowed us to create agricultural societies - I thought that’d been bred out long ago.
“Bred.” Ah-ha. Ah-ha.