The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

Did Grogs suffer from seasonal allergies?

Spring has sprung across most of the country.

Awesome, right?

Not if you've got seasonal allergies.

Anyone with a severe case of hay fever knows how horrible it is

being outside on a windy, otherwise beautiful spring day

with pollen blowing and rapacious bees buzzing around. Your eyes water and swell up,

your nose congests, you go into mouth breather mode. Pressure headaches start. You can't taste your

food. You can't really see through the tears and redness. Everything above the neck isches.

Sneeze attacks seize you. You're supposed to be in heaven. It's all so lovely.

Yet all that beauty, greenery, and life are lost on you. Spring is your enemy when you have hay fever.

It's bad enough as a city dweller who loves the outdoors. At least you've got somewhere to get away.

Imagine you're a hunter-gatherer with hay fever. Your entire life

occurs outside. There's no indoors. Even your shelters blend seamlessly with nature. Your work

is all outside. There's no escaping the pollen, the environmental allergies, the seasons.

And there's no Benadryl or Claritin to mitigate the symptoms.

Yeah, Grok would have really hurt if he had had to deal with seasonal allergies. So, did he?

First, why the hell do we get seasonal allergies anyway? Seasonal allergies occur when your

innate immune system perceives airborne pollen as a threat and overreacts to its presence in your body with the flood of histamine, producing runny nose, itchy eyes, nasal congestion, sneezing, headaches, and other symptoms.

This type of response makes sense with foreign substances that are intrinsically dangerous, like pathogenic microbes,

poisons, and toxins, but there's nothing inherently dangerous about pollen. What gives?

...