Bonus: Gluten-free play-dough!
This is why you donβt 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 eat too much of something. Or, you might go into anaphylactic shock if you breath air thatβs had nuts in it.
My wife has an autoimmune disease thatβs triggered by foods. Some foods more than others, and thereβs some tolerance to each. She shouldnβt 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 canβt have any amount of dairy: the response is rapid, and severe, and she has to take steroids to get it under control. Luckily, sheβs not sensitive to anything (that weβve 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, youβre literally tasting molecules of that thing; second, your skin is your bodyβs largest organ, and you can absolutely ingest stuff through your skin. Thatβs how Novichok, and other nerve agents, work.
Yeah that was 100% a stupid question, but one of those things I never thought about before
Oh, hey @MissJinx; I havenβt seen you in a while.
I donβt think it was a stupid question; frankly, itβs 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 donβt use. Iβd think itβs 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 heβs 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 βSusanneβ, so he makes a βcorrectionβ link. But because someone coughed when you said it, he heard βSusanβ, 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 βBeckyβ -> βSusanβ -> βSusanneβ process, and he says itβs 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.
yes. Celiac disease is usually the one thing we hear people talk about when they canβt eat gluten, so I never thought about alergies with shock response
