First off, what exactly is an allergy? “An actual allergy is when the body over responds…to a substance that ordinarily would not be anything of harm or concern,” Winders says.

An allergy can be anything as mild as a seasonal hay fever, which more than 50 million American suffer with to life-threatening like food or venom allergies that 7 to 8 million Americans have.

When your body goes into hyper-response mode due to some substance it recognizes as harmful, it begins to produce IgE, an antibody, which binds to the allergen and fights it and causes inflammatory symptoms