Are there vegans with allergy to ragweed pollen?

I ate mostly whole plant foods. Very clean for one year.
Not smoking and drinking alcohol.
But I still have allergy to ragweed pollen.
Some sources on internet suggest that going completely raw can help.
My question is are there raw vegans with allergy to ragweed pollen?

A recent document indicates that “allergen-specific immunotherapy (AIT) is the only causative and disease-modifying treatment of allergy with long-lasting effects”. Eating raw foods I suppose is not a great therapy for anything, because that’s more likely to cause other problems that cooking foods can prevent, like digestive issues and food poisoning (which is more likely to kill people than a typical allergen, because everyone’s allergic to those toxins in essence, it just doesn’t happen so severely all the time, but people are reportedly getting food poisoning from raw plant foods all the time, so I wouldn’t underestimate it). Good luck, I hope something works for you. I’m not sure if you can emulate immunotherapy by putting a little under your pillow, by I’d try that myself before eating bad lettuce or something. :dontknow:

Hey expialidocious. Thanks for your input.
You are like totally anti raw, I see. :slight_smile:
I am not raw vegan myself but I know at least one nutrient in broccoli that disappears during cooking - Sulforaphane.
In my country immunotherapy is not available :frowning:

Yeah, good luck with that, maybe sulforaphane is a keeper (the irony with brassicas is that they tend to soak up more heavy metals than other plants, so I don’t necessarily want every “nutrient” to be preserved—mostly something I read about mustard greens though). Increasing raw food exposure may not help, in theory, because it is pretty much the only cause of bad reactions to food, other than allergies (as everyone is essentially allergic to the antinutrients and pathogens in raw, dried, or frozen food, when present—unless cooked immediately before eating, for safety and digesibility—more of what I’ve read in health and agricultural literature, along with trial and error). I’ve gotten into steaming most veggies lately (and those can be pressure steamed pretty quickly). You might try steam therapy with that, if there is such a thing (like putting your face over the hot pot and lifting the lid for a steam bath—I guess it would be more direct than putting something under a pillow, and less severe than breathing in plant dust or whatever)… I looked up something on that though, and it could go either way. Too much inhalation of a steamed allergen has caused anaphylaxis in children, yet steam therapy has alleviated urticaria in adults, so using a small amount would be less risky (that’s the basic idea of immunotherapy, to use a small amount initially).

I don’t know if combining water with an allergen would diminish it for you, but seems possible (as if it were black pepper, and sniffing a pinch made you sneeze, but inhaling its steam perhaps made it more tolerable—that might be a way of testing the concept). Not that I can get used to anything. Well, food combining has something to do with how I react positively or negatively (it goes beyond what I can eat individually, as to whether I can tolerate it in combination). For a while I thought potatoes were something I couldn’t tolerate very well, due to indigestion, however I hadn’t realized that combining them with fat was the problem there (even though I can cook and eat either ingredient separately and mix those with some other foods, they conflict with each other in combination). Sometimes it’s tricky to figure out what’s going on with food, but its preparation can rule some things out. That’s primarily why I got into cooking as a rule (to factor out raw food as a cause of indigestion), instead of eating the usual salads, but then I learned more about how every category of food product has had an outbreak of food poisioning, and this is a common problem with plant foods, which doesn’t get taken very seriously, even though it causes half of the outbreaks, as if the vitamins or nutrients would keep it in check (except for people getting sick and dying of course—like how many times do they have to have a problem with romaine lettuce for it to dawn on everyone that raw food is going to be contaminated on a regular basis—well it has been going on for decades)… has eating raw lettuce made us immune to food poisoning? Not likely (since vitamins or immunotherapy don’t make dirt edible, and cooking it off is more effective than rinsing—or even the water used to grow it can be contaminated, so yeah, good luck with rinsing that out).

Not to harp on it so much, I know it isn’t said to be a major health concern at all times, but my point was that those kinds of things are universally not well tolerated (and it is only the severity of intolerance that differs, like diarrhea usually, and sometimes organ failure or death, especially for people with immunodeficiencies, or allergies perhaps), so raw food might only complicate matters—I think it does for me anyway, so I wouldn’t want to be eating that while feeling under the weather, or at an advanced age, or pretty much ever again, because you never know (except that it is a serious problem for someone, every day, somewhere around the world, yet this would be largely preventable if nobody consumed things raw). I was just reading another news story about an outbreak, though, and people mostly want to be reassured that it is okay to keep eating the stuff as usual, like it never happened, so then it keeps happening—even with foods that are required to be cooked for food safety. I just said forget it, everything is contaminated, and nobody’s handling what I eat unless I cook it personally. Well, at least I don’t get sick as often anymore (I try to avoid aimlessly standing around sick people as well, this seems to help—being that things like the flu can be similar to pollen floating through the air—I don’t hang around long enough to consider wearing a mask, but they say it can help prevent allergic rhinitis, or that may become less common as one gets older, unlike these other issues, which is when a raw diet wouldn’t necessarily boost immunity—but let’s just take more vitamin C, yipee). Whatever works for you, I’m thinking that some things don’t work for anyone (but that’s a worst case scenario, which doesn’t happen to everyone at the same time, so it’s a matter of perspective—I used to think raw foods made more sense, and have had hay fever in the past, but not lately, so I think cooking my food could have helped boost my immunity, if my immune system uses less resources that way, since there would be fewer pathogens in the food, then maybe the ones in the air would be dealt with most effectively). I’d like to think cooking always works, as recommended by the CDC (for food safety at least, I’m not sure if they extend this to allergies, but I can imagine there being a connection). I haven’t gotten sick as such since cooking more as a rule (with few exceptions); this seems to be an improvement in my experience (going on a year here).

Looking something else up on the subject, there is a theory that humans are cucinivores (cucinare meaning to cook), so this kind of adaptation could be food for thought, as well (perhaps eating raw plant food influences allergic reactions, somehow, above and beyond the usual pathogenesis to do with flesh). See, like I said, it’s a long story! You know, cooking everything takes long enough, so I said too much. :blah5:

Wow! Many thanks for such a detailed reply.
Anaphylactic reaction is too big a risk for me. I am not prepared for this. Don’t have the necessary injections etc.

Do you speak Italian?