Are food allergies autoimmune? Before I was diagnosed w/ T1D, thru skin tests I was found allergic (stuffy nose, sore throats, hay fever) to walnuts, pollens, cat dander, etc. But by then our beloved pet cat was treated as a family member & allergy was regarded as “sketchy” medicine, so my brother & I got by with gargling hot dilute salt water (+ smidgen baking soda) and antihistamine capsules at bedtime. My little brother’s symptoms were so bad he had to go thru the trauma of
a tonsillectomy (a then accepted medical practice). Decades after T1D onset, my bro’ and I were diagnosed with celiac disease. Before celiac diagnosis I was diagnosed with arthritis, and then a persistent but controllable itchy skin rash and a few melanoma. (I see a great dermatologist yearly.) Our mom was asthmatic, our pop bothered by psoriasis, died of colon cancer. I was long ignorant that cancer and arthritis were autoimmune diseases. Some environmental factors we can’t control, some we can (smoking, alcohol, exercise, job environment, diet, sun exposure, nuclear radiation from bomb tests/reactor leaks). Was your pregnant mom’s shared blood filled with stress hormones while you were a fetus? Was she financially and emotionally secure? Epigenetic trauma, like slavery? Bondage? Poverty? Intermarriage? War refugee? Racism? High cancer and diabetes diagnoses among South Pacific Islanders often blamed on US nuclear bomb tests. Remember Bikini Island? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Now think Chernobyl? Three Mile Island? Fukushima?