Name: Why allergies are getting worse | Chasing Life
Uploaded: 2026-03-20T16:32:20.000Z
Duration: 28 min 59 s
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Welcome to Chasing Life and the official first day of spring.

You know, for many people, this means there are beautiful blooming flowers, there's warmer weather, great stuff.

But for others we know, it can also be the dreaded start of allergy season.

Now, if you're someone who has experienced a major or even minor allergic reaction to pollen or to foods, it can sometimes be irritating, but

I want to share those stories today because, frankly, they taught me a lot about allergies and I think they might be able to help you as well.

Questions being, what exactly are allergies?

Are they the same as intolerance to things?

He's a pediatric allergist, clinical immunologist, and he just recently released his book called All About Allergies.

So today we're chasing down the answers to allergies, from pollen to peanuts, symptoms and nits.

We're going to break it all down, connect the dots between the environment, between our exposures, and

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent.

First of all, I just, I want to welcome you to Chasing Life and just tell you that, you know, I'm a fan of yours.

I have been following you on social media for some time.

I've read your book, which I'm anxious to talk about.

Let me ask you, if someone is listening and they say, look, I am someone who has allergies, concerned about allergies, at what point should they be seeing an allergist?

The first is if you have just seasonal allergies or hay fever and you've tried over the counter medications, they're not really working well.

You need to get a formal test from an allergist to figure out what is bothering you.

And then immunotherapy, which is actually a disease modifying treatment, we can train your immune system to become less reactive through a controlled exposure.

And so that can significantly improve somebody's quality of life and reduce their risk of developing new allergies if they're a young child or even potentially developing asthma.

It is something that we have been doing for about 100 years now and we know a lot about how it works.

We're still trying to figure out why this older therapy is so effective.

I mean, do they exist for some evolutionary reason?

Yeah, yeah, we do think there is a bit of a protective nature to it.

So as an example, with food allergies, we know that that's been around for thousands of years, but

There's even ancient Chinese texts that talk about avoiding specific foods during pregnancy or different parts of life.

So there's definitely evidence that it's been around and it's probably as a protective measure against toxins or parasites that were found in food and it became this more exaggerated response.

If people feel like their symptoms are bad enough that they need to see someone like Zachary Rubin, what would those symptoms be?

At what point do you think, hey, look, this is bad enough that I need to go see an allergist, Right.

So from the seasonal allergy side, this is somebody who's having chronic sinus headaches, pain and pressure, terrible nasal congestion, they're not sleeping well, they've tried all the over counter medications and they're not getting quite relief from it.

But we take care of a lot more than just allergies.

You could see a dermatologist as well, depending on, you know, what your availability is.

But we would look at it from the standpoint of if you have severe eczema, what are the potential triggering factors for it?

And now we have these biologic medications that have exploded over the past 10 to 20 years that actually will treat a very small portion of the immune system that's causing this abnormal response leading to severe eczema or severe asthma.

We take care of patients who have been on high doses of inhaled steroids and have had multiple asthma attacks.

And we look at what are the triggering factors and how do we manage this appropriately.

And we fill a niche throughout all these different specialties where we look at the immune system and say, why is it abnormally responding to these foreign substances and how is this impacting people's lives, where they're ending up in the er, they're ending up in urgent care, in the hospital, not exactly sure what's going on, or the treatments given by their primary care physicians are just not quite enough.

So there are several factors for it and I discuss it in my book, but

one of the issues, when we talk about chronic sinus infections or Allergies is the fact that our global temperatures have been rising, and

that's correlated with the emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, as an example.

And we know that when you have higher CO2 in the atmosphere, that causes pollen grains to be released from more earlier and stopping later in the season.

So if you look at the general trends, our pollen counts have been steadily rising, so people are exposed to more of these allergens.

Therefore more people are developing allergies.

If you look at all of the allergic diseases put together, it's one of the top 10 most common chronic diseases in the United States are these different allergic diseases.

The gut microbiome we're still trying to learn more about and its impact through early antibiotic use, early antacid use to treat reflux in babies, C sections.

We know that the babies aren't exposed to the bacterial milieu in the birth canal.

These are bacteria that help process whatever you're consuming and whatever you're exposed to.

so there's a lot of healthy bacteria, but

we often alter it through antibiotics or antacids, thereby presenting these different proteins to the immune system differently.

And that could increase the risk of developing these problems.

So are there chemicals in the environment we're exposed to?

So many questions that we're still trying to answer.

We just don't quite have a handle on it yet.

What usually happens is they'll get a bunch of paperwork ahead of time, just like with any other physician or specialist that they fill out their general history before they come in.

And then when I see them, I take a detailed history, trying to figure out what are the specific symptoms that are bothering them, when are they bothering them?

What do they try to make it better or worse?

And then we talk about allergy testing, whether that's going to be by blood testing or skin testing.

I typically will do skin testing for most of my patients because we get an answer very quickly.

We'll put the extracts of these allergens, like pollen, dust or mold, on their skin.

Let that sit for about 15 minutes to see if they get what looks like mosquito bites.

And that tells us that there's an indirect measurement of an antibody, a protein called immunoglobulin E or IGE for short.

That is something that your immune System makes in a process called sensitization, where it thinks it's basically a parasite and that when you have subsequent exposure, would lead to these allergy symptoms that people are experiencing.

And so when we get that test result, we can then talk about ways to reduce exposure.

What are the appropriate medications to take and when you should take them, Because I try to minimize the amount of medications they're using.

And then we talk about immunotherapy as a potential option.

So those allergy injections, how bad can this be?

We know that they can potentially be deadly.

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Why allergies are getting worse | Chasing Life

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