No, auto-immune means that your immune system attacks the body. Allergies are where your immune system flags non-self, non-harmless stuff as harmful.
And the answer is: no one knows.
It’s rare for adults with no history of food allergies as children to develop them (that’s me —- ate whatever I wanted until last year). It’s even more rare for them to develop more than one or two. So, it’s probably just the generic lottery. Some gene decided to flip on one day. Just cosmically bad luck.
That said, I do have a pet theory that a high dose of methylprednisolone corticosteroids just prior to the appearance of the allergies fucked my immune system somehow. Unfortunately there’s zero other documented cases/scientific precedent for the hypothesis, besides the dubious timing. I was on them for two weeks, and literally the day after I finished tapering off of them, I started having reactions to tons of foods. Whether that’s correlation or causation will likely never be proven.
And even still, even if I could prove it, there’s fuck all I can do about getting a normal life back, because when adults develop food allergies, they’re permanent 99.9% of the time. We don’t have a way to “teach” the immune system that it mistakenly flagged something. That’s the holy grail right there but after seeing how far off we are from that, I’ve lost a lot of faith in medical science. You would think we’d be even in the same galaxy as producing that sort of cure, but we don’t even understand why the allergies develop yet. Plus, funding for food allergy research is funneled towards children —- who, quite often, grow out of their allergies as they reach adulthood. There’s reason to believe that the mechanisms of food allergy development differ significantly between adults and children, so all that research for kids might not even apply to me. The whole thing is a giant mess and I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of ever eating like a normal person again.
And the answer is: no one knows.
It’s rare for adults with no history of food allergies as children to develop them (that’s me —- ate whatever I wanted until last year). It’s even more rare for them to develop more than one or two. So, it’s probably just the generic lottery. Some gene decided to flip on one day. Just cosmically bad luck.
That said, I do have a pet theory that a high dose of methylprednisolone corticosteroids just prior to the appearance of the allergies fucked my immune system somehow. Unfortunately there’s zero other documented cases/scientific precedent for the hypothesis, besides the dubious timing. I was on them for two weeks, and literally the day after I finished tapering off of them, I started having reactions to tons of foods. Whether that’s correlation or causation will likely never be proven.
And even still, even if I could prove it, there’s fuck all I can do about getting a normal life back, because when adults develop food allergies, they’re permanent 99.9% of the time. We don’t have a way to “teach” the immune system that it mistakenly flagged something. That’s the holy grail right there but after seeing how far off we are from that, I’ve lost a lot of faith in medical science. You would think we’d be even in the same galaxy as producing that sort of cure, but we don’t even understand why the allergies develop yet. Plus, funding for food allergy research is funneled towards children —- who, quite often, grow out of their allergies as they reach adulthood. There’s reason to believe that the mechanisms of food allergy development differ significantly between adults and children, so all that research for kids might not even apply to me. The whole thing is a giant mess and I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of ever eating like a normal person again.