Yep, I've had to cut out gluten. Also have a separate allergy to wheat, most of the nuts (cashews and pecans are fine, just about everything else is bad), the entire legume family (including peas, beans, peanuts, chickpeas, etc.), the carrot/parsley/cilantro/celery/cumin family, the peppers family (green, yellow, red, jalapeņo, chilli peppers, etc.), soy, eggs, sesame, dairy from any animal (with the exception of some cheeses thanks to the allergy meds I'm on - couldn't do that before without swelling up), brussels sprouts, sunflowers, and a bunch of other oddball grains and veggies. No issues with fruits, though, which is nice. Except if they've been treated with something - I've had that happen before with berries. Also, been vegetarian for years for health reasons. All of that together severely limits my diet. I go off of it sometimes, but then I have to take different allergy meds that put me to sleep shortly afterwards, and even with that I'm usually swollen for about 3 days. None of it's life-threatening, I just turn red, my face and neck puff up, I can't swallow, breathing gets difficult, and it hurts really bad. And for some of it (like cumin), my lips and tongue swell up. But not life-threatening.

I've got some environmental allergies as well, but most of them are not nearly as bad.

With all that, I'm a huge advocate for people getting tested for food allergies. I've had them my whole life, and when you've never known anything different, you don't really realize that eating doesn't always have to hurt. It's nothing abnormal for you - you have no baseline for comparison. And now that I know how big of a difference it makes, it makes it so you can really see how many people suffer from the same symptoms but have absolutely no idea. The blood test, for me, was mostly pretty accurate and is a quick and easy way to get you 90% of the way there. I'm no doctor and this is not medical advice, but if you have any question, I'd highly recommend looking into it.

And, yeah, I've thought the same thing for a long time - that I find it pretty hard to believe that glyphosate plays no part in the amount of allergies we're seeing nowadays. It's one of the big reasons why I think GMOs are things to avoid. The organism itself may be harmless, but it enables the use of other stuff like glyphosate. Not to mention the stupid intellectual property laws we have in the USA where you can patent self-replicating (and, indeed, cross-contaminating) organisms.

But, I digress.

Needless to say, wearing a super awesome amazing-looking wool kilt or the wool kilt hose I'd like to is not worth the risk of developing a new allergy. I've got enough of them already, and my body's quite good at making up new ones. Once I started developing a wool sensitivity, I ditched wool about as fast as I could. Which leads to this project.