Discover Magazine reports that the bite from a certain tick can cause a person to become allergic to eating meat, based on an allergic response to a type of mammal-meat based sugar.

Not every bite from a lone star tick necessarily causes the allergy. The bite I blame for my allergy wasn’t my first tick bite—not by a long shot—or even my first that summer. Having grown up in the woods, I’m so used to tick bites that I don’t even notice them half the time. But I remember this particular bite because it left an itchy welt behind that lasted for weeks after I’d tweezed out the tick itself. Long-lasting, itchy welts, I now know, are one of the hallmarks of an allergy-causing tick bite.

So how does a tick’s bite transform your immune system into a meat-attacking machine? Tick saliva is “a really good provocateur of an immune response, even outside of an infection,” Commins told me, though they are not yet sure whether it’s bacteria carried in tick saliva or the saliva itself that is responsible. But they believe that something in some ticks’ saliva stimulates the human immune system to produce antibodies to a sugar present in mammalian meat, though not poultry and fish, called galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose (alpha-gal for short). The next time an unsuspecting meat lover chows down on a hamburger, those antibodies could rally a systemic allergic reaction.

This does seem like a far more effective way of going vegetarian than making a New Years resolution though.