This article is based on an expert interview with Katie Marks-Cogan, MD, conducted by wikiHow Staff Editors. Dr. Katie Marks-Cogan is a board certified Pediatric & Adult Allergist at Clear Allergy based in Los Angeles, California. She is the Chief Allergist for Ready, Set, Food!, an infant dietary supplement designed to reduce the risk of childhood food allergies. She received her M.D. with honors from the University of Maryland. She then completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Northwestern University and fellowship in Allergy/Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania and CHOP.
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Children and adults can be allergic to all kinds of different foods, but where do those allergies come from? Are you born with food allergies, or can you develop them later in life? In this video, allergist Katie Marks-Cogan breaks down the science behind food allergies, including what causes them and when they really develop.
No one is born with a food allergy. Food allergies develop over time. As I mentioned before, food allergies are multifactorial. They are a mix of your genetics and your environmental and dietary exposures early in life. If you avoid eating certain allergenic foods, like eggs or peanuts, in infancy, then you don't train your immune system. If your first ingestion of these foods comes later in life, your immune system is more likely to treat them like an invader and cause an allergic reaction. Even though they're common in children, adults can develop food allergies too. Food allergies we develop as adults are sometimes caused by environmental, also known as airborne, allergens. For instance, some adults can suffer from pollen food syndrome. They become sensitized to different pollen from trees, grasses, or weeds, and their immune system confuses certain proteins in foods for that pollen. Often, eating the food cooked rather than raw does not cause a reaction because cooking denatures, or breaks down, the protein and our immune system doesn't recognize it.
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