Eliminating and even minimizing high histamine foods can be extremely helpful for countering histamine intolerance, but to truly get to the root of histamine issues you have to dump your histamine bucket.
Histamine intolerance is an issue of balancing what’s coming in with what’s going out. And overload or intolerance occurs when there’s imbalance of either too much histamine coming in or not enough going out. Usually there are issues with both.
High histamine foods like yogurt, cured meats, bone broth, wine, even avocados, tomatoes, spinach, or bananas may seem like the problem because they’re causing a reaction when you eat them, but that’s just because they’re the last drops in the bucket.
They’re often the drops that makes the whole thing start spilling over.
And you start getting symptoms like…
- headaches
- migraines
- bloating
- diarrhea
- anxiety
- heart palpitations
- insomnia
The foods may seem to to be the trigger, but there’s usually something much more complex going on below the surface….
You’re less tolerant to the high histamine foods because your histamine bucket is already full.
It’s because of all the things that came before going all the way down the list, one usually leads to another, and another…
- Food sensitivities
- Impaired methylation
- Malabsorption
- Insufficient DAO enzyme
- GI inflammation
- Dysbiosis
- Estrogen dominance
Take food sensitivities for example…
Usually they develop because of leaky gut, which is increased permeability of the gut lining that allows undigested food particles to leak out into the blood stream where the immune system reacts to them.
Then every time we eat that food we’re sensitive now too, our bodies make more histamine as part of the immune response.
More drops in the bucket.
Continuing to eat the foods we’re sensitive to attracts more inflammation in the gut, impairing production of enzymes that are made in the brush border of the GI lining, like the DAO enzyme (required to break down histamine) and enzymes for digesting gluten and dairy – making these intolerances worse, and further impairing histamine breakdown.
We get maldigestion and malabsorption which leads to lower levels of nutrients, affecting processes like methylation which requires B vitamins like B6, B9, B12, and amino acids.
With lower levels of these nutrients we don’t methylate as well, which we have to be able to do to clear histamine.
See how these drops add up?
See how easy it is for the bucket to fill, and to start filling more rapidly as each of these factors compounds…
This is how your histamine bucket fills up.
And you get histamine overload and histamine intolerance.
The solution?
We’ve gotta dump the bucket.
Relief comes from working down the level of histamine from both sides – what’s coming in (minimizing high histamine foods and drinks) versus what’s going out (how your body is breaking down, detoxing, and clearing histamine).
When you do that, histamine intolerance symptoms disappear, you can eat high histamine foods again without a reaction, you can get back to living a normal life where you actually feel GOOD!
Ready to dump your histamine bucket so you can get say goodbye to histamine-related symptoms and feel better than you can even imagine right now?
As a functional health coach I help folks get to the real root of their symptoms so they can finally feel like themselves again. Ready to get started? Best thing to do is to grab a spot on my calendar for a time to chat here.
P.S. As a functional health coach I help folks get to the real root of their symptoms so they can finally feel like themselves again. Ready to get started? Best thing to do is to grab a spot on my calendar for a time to chat here.
