Why Food Allergy Prevalence Is Growing
The director of population health research at the Northwest University’s Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research suggests that increasing food allergy rates in the developed world may be partly due to advancements in medicine and certain parental habits. By the 1980s, Northwest University Professor Christopher Warren says, the United States had mostly eliminated tapeworms and hookworms. Without any actual threats to deal with, our immune systems downgraded their attention to relatively harmless allergens such as birch pollen and walnuts. Anecdotal results from some researchers who injected themselves with hookworms found that introducing the parasite into their systems somewhat distracted…
