Something You Should Know
Why So Many People Have Allergies & Why You Keep Doing Things You Shouldn’t
02 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: How can body posture influence creativity?
I know you like interesting and thought-provoking conversations and ideas because you listen to something you should know. So let me recommend another podcast I know you will enjoy. It's The Jordan Harbinger Show. Jordan has a real talent for getting his guests to share stories and offer thought-provoking insights.
Over the years, I've sent a lot of people to listen, and I get feedback from people who are so glad I introduced them to The Jordan Harbinger Show. Recently, he discussed Scientology and the children who were raised in that organization. It's a fascinating conversation. And he talked with Dr. Rhonda Patrick about how to protect your mind and body from the modern world.
And it's tougher than you think. I've gotten to know Jordan pretty well. We talk frequently, and I tell you, he is a very smart, insightful guy who does a hell of a podcast. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, why coming up with a great idea could depend on the position of your body.
Then, understanding allergies, why we get them, what to do about them, and why some people who think they have them actually don't.
Allergies in general, whether we talk about allergic rhinitis, eczema, food allergies, asthma, medication reactions, it's one of the most common chronic diseases that affect millions of people, and it's just not talked about enough.
Also, if you want to lose weight, just how important is exercise? And why do we do things to please other people that we know aren't good for us?
The most common, I can't take credit for this quote, but lighting yourself on fire to keep someone else warm. Essentially, you know what your needs are, but you meet someone else's first. I find that incredibly common.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Chapter 2: What qualifies as an allergy and why are they on the rise?
But what would be the difference in the treatment? It seems like you would take, you know, Claritin or Flonase or something regardless of which one it was.
Right, so actually that's not the case. So if you have allergic rhinitis, yes, something like Claritin or an antihistamine helps because one of the main chemicals released from your immune system is histamine. So you take an antihistamine to block those effects. But if you have non-allergic rhinitis, there's a lot less histamine being released.
So taking an antihistamine is not quite as effective. So we have to rely on other treatments like nasal sprays that contain steroids that can help just decrease the overall immune response locally in that area to treat those symptoms. Antihistamines are great for sneezing and runny nose and even potentially some coughing or post-nasal drip.
But if your nose is really stuffy and there's a ton of mucus production, then a steroid is going to be more effective when you take that topically like Aflonase or Nasacort. And so can I tell the difference or do I have to go to the doctor to tell the difference? You would need to go to an allergist to get formal testing to be able to tell the difference.
It's not something that I can figure out clinically without testing. So basically what happens is either they will order a blood test or a skin test that's trying to measure for that IgE antibody either on your skin or blood to the specific substances in the environment. If it's a positive test, you have allergies. If it's negative, we call that the non-allergic rhinitis.
Is there a sense as to, because so many people complain of those symptoms, as to how many people have allergies versus how many people have the non-allergy version?
It's not entirely clear because we aren't able to skin test everybody in the United States. We kind of have to extrapolate it. More people have allergies in general, but as you get older, it tends to turn into this non-allergic subtype. There are a lot of elderly who have just a constant runny nose as an example, and that has nothing to do with pollen.
It's something that constantly happens, and we treat that with different nasal sprays to try to dry up the nose as an example.
But allergies in general, whether we talk about allergic rhinitis, hay fever is another term for that, eczema, food allergies, asthma, chronic hives, medication reactions, it's one of the most common chronic diseases that we face in the United States that affect millions of people, and it's just not talked about enough.
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Chapter 3: What happens during an allergic reaction?
That's one example. Another is as a baby, you had an infection. The doctor gives an antibiotic and you get a nonspecific rash. That's not necessarily a severe allergic reaction. It could actually be a response from the virus or bacteria infecting you and creating a rash in it. It gets confusing to figure out is this truly from the medication or from the infection itself.
There are a lot of what we call viral exanthems where you develop rashes naturally as your immune system is fighting off an infection. So it can be difficult to truly verify whether it's an allergic reaction or not. And even if it was, we estimate that most people with a true penicillin allergy outgrow it.
If you abstain from that medication for at least 10 years, the majority will lose that sensitivity over time and they get lost to follow up or there's difficult issues related to having physicians test this out because it's not always covered by insurance. There's a lot of issues related to the resources that go into doing this type of testing.
And so this is something that many allergists are trying to figure out ways to streamline this process of de-labeling penicillin allergies on people's medical charts. Because if you carry that label, you're at a higher risk of developing severe complications while you're in the hospital
longer hospitalization stays and even potentially higher mortality rates by having that label because you can't take a highly effective medication that has less side effects. You end up having to take these different antibiotics that are more expensive, potentially more side effects and may not be as effective.
When I was growing up, I don't remember hearing people talk about food allergies that, you know, little Johnny could, could die if he's exposed to a peanut. I mean, I just, I'd never ever heard that.
Now you hear it a lot. Yes. And when I was a kid, I had a milk allergy that I outgrew. Um, and I knew one girl with a peanut allergy and that was it. And, um,
part of that is recognition there are many accounts of people who would have what we would now consider a food allergy that it just was not talked about or recognized that actually has existed there's even documentation from the middle ages of dignitaries who had food allergies and potentially used it for political gain as a possibility of saying that somebody was trying to poison me but they likely had a food allergy the
These things did exist, but they were poorly understood. And since the 1990s, not only has the recognition increased, but we have seen diagnosis of food allergies rapidly increase where the rates have more than tripled over the past 20 to 30 years. And why would that be? That is the billion dollar question. So I'll give you some factors as to why this may be the case.
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Chapter 4: How can you differentiate between allergic and non-allergic rhinitis?
until later in life, like two to three years of age, depending on the food. But that was meant for only high-risk individuals, like children who have eczema, as an example. We then learned a study called Learning Early About Peanut, or the LEAP study. It randomized kids to either consume peanut protein before they turned one regularly, or wait until they turned five. And delaying the introduction
significantly increase the risk of those children developing peanut allergies. If you introduced it before one, there's about an 80% less likely chance of that happening. Not 100%, but something that we recognize now that we've changed the guidelines over the past 10 years or so, and we're starting to see a slow decline in food allergy rates, especially for peanut allergies as an example.
There's also associations between C-sections, early antibiotic use, and early antacid use. These are all issues related to the gut microbiome. That's the bacterial milieu that helps process foods and present it to our immune system. And so if you take antibiotics early in life, that could kill not just bad bacteria, but good bacteria.
If you're born through C-section, you're not exposed to the birth canal and the bacterial flora that is present. If you take antacids, that could also disrupt the gut microbiome. We also have increases in eczema prevalence. eczema is a chronic itchy skin condition characterized by a disrupted skin barrier.
So when any foreign substance comes into contact with a disrupted skin barrier, your immune system in your skin recognizes that material is foreign and could create an allergic response to it. And that is what we call the atopic march or allergic march, where someone who was born early on develops eczema, they're more likely to develop
hay fever, food allergies, and asthma later in life because they're all interconnected. There could be issues related to how food is processed and prepared. There could be a pollutant. We don't really know, but I can guarantee you it's not one particular issue. As most complicated chronic diseases are, it's multifactorial.
We're taking an important look at allergies, and my guest is Dr. Zachary Rubin. He's a double board certified pediatrician and allergist immunologist and author of the book All About Allergies, Everything You Need to Know About Asthma, Food Allergies, Hay Fever, and More.
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Chapter 5: Why do so many people think they're allergic to penicillin?
Is it passed down? Is it all environmental? Some or both? I don't know.
Yeah, so most of these allergic diseases, it's a combination of genetics and environmental factors. So if you have a parent with asthma, as an example, their child is significantly at higher risk of developing asthma, which that's an airway disease that's chronic, usually diagnosed in children, but can happen in adults.
And it's often triggered by a lot of these things we've talked about earlier in terms of pollen, mold, different environmental triggers or pollutants, irritants, exercise. All those things can be triggering to an extent. Eczema is a significant risk factor for developing asthma. So that's one example. The exposures make a difference.
Air pollution, as an example, is a significant risk factor for developing asthma. or if you are in housing that's very old and has a lot of dust and mold, those early exposures can be problematic. And what's interesting is recently we've had studies seeing strong associations between somebody who has a gas or wood burning stove
in the house and developing asthma because when you are burning that in your home you are releasing a lot of volatile organic compounds like nitrogen dioxide which can really cause inflammation in your lungs and you don't necessarily smell it but it causes that so if you don't if you don't have an electric stove and you're using gas you got to make sure you put on um the the fan
on your stove, as well as opening up windows whenever you're cooking to reduce the amount of exposure that you have to those irritating substances.
Is it safe to assume that the most common allergy is things in the air, pollen, whatever is in the air that makes people sneeze, and that's the most common?
Right. So pollen is one of the most common environmental allergens, whether it's from trees, grasses, or weeds that are wind pollinated, not the fresh cut flowers like roses. When you sneeze with that, that's from the fragrance, not the pollen, because you don't get exposed to that regularly. So that's your seasonal allergens.
The most common indoor allergens is typically dust mites, which are found anywhere where there are human skin cells and humidity, like in your bedding is the main one or carpeting is an example.
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Chapter 6: What are the common symptoms and risks associated with food allergies?
Great question. When we're being raised by parents, a close family, whomever's around us the most, we are picking up on all of the different behaviors, how people engage in conflict. How do people show that they love each other? How do people make up after a fight? All of the different patterns of behavior we see expressed by our parents, our grandparents, our aunts and uncles,
And we slowly kind of draw the blueprint for life and how we're gonna engage in it. And that's usually where these types of patterns come from, for better, for worse, right? We might be like, hey, our family's really good at getting over a conflict and coming back together and repairing. Yay, so we grow up with that blueprint.
Or it could be, hey, my family's really good at pretending everything's okay even when it's not.
In order to address it, though, you have to realize it's a problem. If you don't think it's a problem, then there's no problem. So do people have a tendency to say, I know I do this and it's causing trouble? Or do people say, I just this is this is me?
I think a lot of people, especially more recently, think it's a problem and realize it. But it's not just, aha, oh my God, I hate that I do this. I don't think the realization is so clear like that. I think it's more like I feel tired and I don't know why or I'm super stressed or I feel anxious.
It kind of comes out in other ways because if you think about it, if we're always putting everybody else first, then that means that our needs aren't getting met and we might find ourselves exhausted. or unable to sleep at night, or even getting sick a lot. There can be a lot of different ways that it can come out.
And I feel like it's through the repetition of those kinds of symptoms that we then realize like, oh my God, what's happening? Like, why is this happening to me? Why do I keep doing this? Why do I keep feeling this way? And that kind of curiosity, the wondering of the why is how we discover it.
And then when you discover it, how do you start to address it, fix it, get it out of the way?
I think the best first step in that is honestly just realizing how it shows up for you. One of the first homework assignments my therapist gave me was to notice how often I say sorry every day. And for anybody who doesn't struggle with people pleasing, they're like, this would not be a big deal.
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Chapter 7: How do environmental factors contribute to allergy development?
I have to do something for it. I have to like pull myself out from the underdog role into the, you know, the leading role. And that is,
realizing that that core belief was like messing my life up essentially was a huge eye-opener for me and i believe that we all have these false beliefs about self that need identifying and then then that's what we work on does that make sense yeah because i think what what you're describing about yourself so many people identify with that that need to earn your place at the table rather than just feel like you have a place at the table
Exactly.
Well, stop it.
Easier said than done, right? My therapist's homework, it's funny when you're like, just stop doing it. My therapist is like, I want you to try not saying sorry for a week. I didn't even make it a day, Mike. It was terrible and embarrassing. But it was eye-opening, you know, that like, why is this silly behavior? Like, why do I keep doing this? And I don't want to.
And it was because it was bigger than that.
And so how important is it to figure out the why? Why are you doing it? Is it important to figure that out or is it important to change it and you don't really need to know why?
I think the why is vital. I believe strongly that if we just try to, like I said, like trim the leaves off the ends, if we just try to stop doing certain behaviors, it will either, one of two things will happen. Number one, it will come right back and we'll find ourselves doing it again. And it'll be really frustrating and we'll feel really stuck.
Or number two, we will suppress that one action and it will crop up in another way. Ta-da! It's all tied to the same belief. It's all tied to the same thing. It just comes up in a zillion different ways until I was honest with myself enough or had enough courage to admit that I just didn't think I was worth it and that that was a really terrible feeling.
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Chapter 8: What strategies can help interrupt self-sabotaging behaviors?
So yeah, it's a very common problem. We've all been in situations like that. I feel like at least once in our life and it doesn't feel good.
Well, I think an awful lot of people listening can relate to this whole idea of behaviors that you do repeatedly that you really wish you wouldn't. And I admire your willingness to share your journey with what you went through to help other people. Katie Morton has been my guest. She's a licensed marriage and family therapist, and she's author of a book called Why Do I Keep Doing This?
Unlearn the Habits Keeping You Stuck and Unhappy. And there's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. If you want to lose weight, you should exercise more. I think most people believe that, and it's not really true. The uncomfortable truth is that exercise is one of the least efficient ways to lose weight.
Now, it's great for your heart and your brain and your mood and your lifespan, and exercise is excellent at preventing weight gain. But when researchers look at weight loss specifically, exercise alone produces far less fat loss than people expect. Why? Well, it's because the body adapts. When you burn more calories through exercise, you often get hungrier.
You may unconsciously move less later in the day. And your metabolism can subtly compensate. In other words, the calories you think you burned off don't translate cleanly into fat loss. A major scientific review concluded that physical activity by itself is not very effective for weight loss without dietary changes to go along with it.
So exercise matters, but not for the reason most people think. And that is something you should know. I hope you got something out of this episode. And if you did, you could share it in a review or at least leave us a rating on whatever platform you listen on. It really helps the show in terms of exposure. So please leave us a rating and review and I'd appreciate it. I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
Hey, it's Hilary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right now in the world of reproductive health, and we're covering it all. Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm, so many stories about sperm, and of course, the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages.
If you're new to the show, check out an episode called The Staircase. It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talked to plenty of non-parents. so you don't have to be a parent to listen.
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