Theresa (Teresa) McPhail
speaker
104 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Jul
Theresa (Teresa) McPhail’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That there's something about getting the right exposures to the right bacteria or the right viruses and fungi that will help train our immune system.
You're born with a novice, a naive immune system that hasn't seen anything.
And you're born with an innate immune system, which means there are things online from the very beginning that just act as a brute force response to anything that threatens the individual.
And then you have an adaptive immune system, which involve your T cells and your B cells and your antibodies that remember the things that you've been exposed to.
And so the theory is those have to be trained.
And they have to be trained in the right order.
And they have to be exposed to the same types of bugs, microbes that they would have been evolving with for millennia.
The theory is that we've changed so much that some of those are missing.
It has confused our immune system to the extent that you're seeing more allergic disease because you're not getting the training.
It's basically advocacy.
And at the forefront of that is a group called FAIR, which is Food Allergy Research and Education.
They're privately funded and run by a group of parents.
When I started researching the book, one of the first people I sat down with was Helen Jaffe, her and her husband David.
are some of the founding members of FAIR, and they also have helped to fund the Jaffe Center at Mount Sinai for food allergy research.
When they started the foundation, it was because two of their children had quite severe food allergies, but it was at a time where no one was doing this.
They live here in New York City, and they had to take the train down to Johns Hopkins to see Dr. Hugh Sampson.
He's a renowned food allergist and researcher, and he has been doing this for over 40 years.
But at the time, there were maybe half a dozen people focused on food allergy.
And so initially, Helen told me that their focus was really on education and research funding to try to figure out what was going on, why the rates seemed to be rising, figure out more about the biological mechanisms that drove this response.
I spoke with Dr. Hugh Sampson now, we're talking about years later, and he said he used to
Showing 61–80 of 104 · page 4 of 6
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