Does he elaborate on what kind of noxious chemicals, and how that explains why allergy has been on the rise in the 20th century? (I skimmed the article but couldn't find it)
chems: No. He makes the semi-funny mistake of listing "gold allergy" and nickel allergy as if they're separate. Nickel is a component of low purity gold and that's why people who are allergic to nickel are allergic to low purity gold. The gold atoms are quite blameless, they're just in a bad neighborhood. Kinda like the gluten free guy isn't allergic to 100 individual types of pasta, he's actually allergic to one specific wheat protein, that happens to be in 100 pastas and breads and beer and who knows what else.
Why: Kinda. Paraphrasing the article its a mishmash of the establishment view is it was an evolutionary adaptation that was a net gain until recent civil engineering, and now is a net loss. The mash of the mish is fairly standard inflammation and chronic exposure to a very large and complicated semi-autonomous set of analog systems combined with very close monitoring of a very large populations means all the weird system crashes where balances go haywire will be documented.
So something like eating a peanut in 1700 was OK because your fish diet was clean and the person who died from a peanut was not noticed compared to the bodies stacked like cordwood due to cholera and typhoid and the plague and lack of clean water in general and intestinal parasites and food poisoning. But in 2016 dude eats a fish diet which is contaminated by mercury from coal burning power plants and that combined with low level exposure to a zillion things simultaneously that we know are bad at high level which means his immune system is perma-inflamed into being half way to blowing up all the time, and when he eats a peanut and dies people notice because in 2016, at least in the west, civil engineering means people are not dying of plagues all the time, so it gets documented and wondered about.
Some aspects of the article are not controversial. Consider the accepted establishment theory of epoxy, urethane, or polyester monomer sensitization. The controversy is you have an enormously large complicated system (like physics, or the entire immune system vs the entire planetary industrial era environment) and fans of various gross simplifications and rules of thumb love to argue about which is righter than the other and the borders of acceptable application of those simplifications.
> "The controversy is you have an enormously large complicated system, and fans of various gross simplifications and rules of thumb love to argue about which is righter than the other and the borders of acceptable application of those simplifications."
Not in much detail - and it seems like an obvious objection to the hypothesis: if we grant that exposure to environmental toxins could cause cellular damage that would lead to an immune (over)response, why wouldn't everyone drinking the same tainted water / eating the same pesticide-laden crops / etc. be developing allergies at once?
Why: Kinda. Paraphrasing the article its a mishmash of the establishment view is it was an evolutionary adaptation that was a net gain until recent civil engineering, and now is a net loss. The mash of the mish is fairly standard inflammation and chronic exposure to a very large and complicated semi-autonomous set of analog systems combined with very close monitoring of a very large populations means all the weird system crashes where balances go haywire will be documented.
So something like eating a peanut in 1700 was OK because your fish diet was clean and the person who died from a peanut was not noticed compared to the bodies stacked like cordwood due to cholera and typhoid and the plague and lack of clean water in general and intestinal parasites and food poisoning. But in 2016 dude eats a fish diet which is contaminated by mercury from coal burning power plants and that combined with low level exposure to a zillion things simultaneously that we know are bad at high level which means his immune system is perma-inflamed into being half way to blowing up all the time, and when he eats a peanut and dies people notice because in 2016, at least in the west, civil engineering means people are not dying of plagues all the time, so it gets documented and wondered about.
Some aspects of the article are not controversial. Consider the accepted establishment theory of epoxy, urethane, or polyester monomer sensitization. The controversy is you have an enormously large complicated system (like physics, or the entire immune system vs the entire planetary industrial era environment) and fans of various gross simplifications and rules of thumb love to argue about which is righter than the other and the borders of acceptable application of those simplifications.