Posted on 06/13/2023 10:52:15 AM PDT by nickcarraway
He became an involuntary vegan. A New Jersey man is now allergic to red meat after getting bitten by an invasive species of tick — which has left him unable to consume steak, pork or even dairy products without suffering a serious reaction.
“It just flipped everything — turned my life upside down completely,” Craig Smith, 62, told NJ.com of his unwilling conversion to vegetarianism. “You get so frustrated. Food becomes an enemy to you.”
The Cream Ridge retiree specifically suffers from Alpha-gal syndrome, a potentially life-threatening allergy that triggers an immune reaction to a sugar molecule (carbohydrate galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose) found in meat, per the National Institutes of Health.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Bill Gates is working on a way to give it to EVERYONE
Surely not ice cream!
Friend of mine had this. Sucks. It’s a slooooow recovery.
Since moving to Kentucky 12 years ago I’ve suffered about 30 tick bites. So far no ill effects, but I get them pretty quick. It does take a while for the bite to stop itching. I just grab them between a finger and a fingernail and yank...
I never got a tick bite to cause this, but this is my life.
I feel for the guy.
You mean you developed a meat allergy later in life?
Ticks suck
Well he may have one option if wants to enjoy hamburgers again. Undergo intense chemotherapy followed by a bone marrow transplant. If the transplant is a success and he doesn’t die of complications which he might, then he can start chowing down burgers again.
So the vegans got to the ticks and won them over?
There might be other options.
It doesn’t sound like the ticks are vegan.
It’s almost Bee material when a man living in a place called “Cream Ridge” can’t eat dairy products.
Some kind of reaction.
The allergist says it’s not an allergy because it doesn’t fit the classic allergy symptoms, but it sure acts like an allergy in the time line of when I react and many of the symptoms.
I have ben diagnosed with something called Mast Cell Activation Disease, and food reactions are very common with it, and all of mine either got far worse as I aged, or started when I got past 40.
And it never gets better.
I could probably live with this, except the no dairy part. That would really suck...
(At least he can still eat fish and fowl...)
Not to downplay the guy’s issues, however, but the allergy is only to red meat, beef and pork.
I have not heard that it triggers a poultry, egg, or fish allergy. The guy is not been forced into vegetarianism by the tick bite.
Or veganism.
LOL! We have some people here who think that beef is one of the major food groups...
Have you been checked for leaky gut?
I have Lyme’s Disease.
It’s horrible.
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