I’ve been troubled with cat dander allergies since I was a child. I’d spend the night with friends who had cats and within hours end up with asthma, burning eyes and a pool of snot and tissues.

The worst memory I have is sleeping on the floor at a cousin’s house and waking up in the middle of the night wheezing as a shadow cat menaced over me. This has deeply affected my perspective on the acceptability of cats as household pets (not to mention some data to back up my personal inclinations).

Recently, I’ve gotten into the quantified self world and started troubleshooting some of my allergies. During the months of reading and iterating on ideas, I stumbled across two remarkable solutions to allergies. What is remarkable is that they were both crowdsourced in active online communities centered around health and found unintentionally as side effects from other personal health pursuits.

Option 1. Follow a ketogenic diet (from a reddit post in /r/keto)

A ketogenic diet is based on obtaining 70% or more of your daily caloric intake from fats 20% or so from proteins and 10% or less from carbs. I don’t claim to be an expert and anyone interested can read more here.