Allergic reactions are a pain: itching, swelling and nose running are not symptoms that you want to follow you throughout the day. Avoiding allergens obviously helps with keeping the symptoms down, but there are other factors that can contribute to your ongoing allergy symptoms— one of these factors is the food you consume. In today’s article Dr. Bristow talks about histamines, the enzymes that break them down, and what food can do to either increase or decrease reactions like itching and swelling within your body.
Histamine is a key compound involved in local and body wide inflammatory response. It’s produced and released by immune cells involved in allergic responses. A classic example getting stung by a bee or bitten by a mosquito and having that swollen red itchy area – that’s what histamine does. Histamine is made from the amino acid histidine found in many different foods–especially fermented foods–and is also produced by certain gut bacteria as well as your cells. The itchy, watery eyes, itchy skin, and in fact all the things that you associate with allergies and bites, are mediated by histamine.
Now of course if you have an allergy, for example to dog or cat dander, birch trees, pollen, etc, and you are exposed to your allergens, your body will react. So what is the difference between histamine intolerance and allergies? To understand this, we need to learn a little about histamine.
We all have three enzymes in our body which are responsible for breaking down histamine: one which breaks down histamine in our intestines, and the other two that break down histamine inside our cells. These enzymes are as vital to our body as a properly functioning drain is to a bathtub. If you can’t release water faster than the speed of a running faucet, you’ll have an overflow on your hands. The same goes for your body and a histamine intolerance. We all have and need a certain amount of histamine in our bodies as it serves an important role beyond just itching and swelling. People with allergies, however, are producing and releasing more and more histamine, and if they also have a deficiency in the degrading enzymes, then they overflow: this is basically what a histamine intolerance is. This is why you can be going along most of your life, dealing fairly well with allergies, and then almost all of a sudden get major reactions: your tub is running over! When your tub is overflowing like this, your body is no longer keeping up with breaking down the histamine, and so your symptoms go from irritating to ridiculous.
The extra piece of this puzzle is food: imagine you’ve thrown a few toys into your overflowing bath tub, you’re making some extra splashes, and now you’ve really got yourself some intense symptoms. Since one of these enzymes breaks down the histamine in food, if there’s a deficiency or a genetic defect in the process of using or creating that enzyme, then you are at a big time disadvantage. A trial histamine-reduced diet is a good way to monitor your body’s response to intolerance of these histamine rich foods, and it also dials back your faucet, giving the slow drain a chance to fight the overflow.
If you are suffering with swelling, itching, flushing, reactions to alcohol (especially red wine), headaches, migraines, allergies, seasonal allergies, hives, food sensitivities, bug bites that get very swollen, itchy legs with exercise, prickly heat, motion sickness, nausea, chest tightness, asthma, eczema, psoriasis, or insomnia, consider you might be dealing with a histamine intolerance.
There are many effective tools for dealing with histamine:
- Diet – making sure what you’re eating is as fresh as possible. Avoid fermented foods, leftovers, citrus, only fresh fish, alcohol and aged foods. This includes cheeses, wines and processed meats.
- Stress – histamine actually is released when you’re stressed too, whether it’s physical, emotional or mental stress, finding a healthy way to cope with your triggers is an important piece in slowing down a running faucet.
- Nutrient deficiencies – these are involved with the histamine breakdown process: B12, folate, B6, B2, B1, zinc, copper, vitamin C. Ensure vitamin supplements contain the activated forms of b vitamins to avoid genetic defect issues such as MTHFR mutation.
- Supplements – there’s a variety of supplements which can help such as: quercetin, nettles, particular probiotic strains, and DAO enzyme supplement. Support your digestion and adrenals to ensure success!
Well I hope you learned something! If you’d like to look into this for yourself, you can book an appointment with me here at the clinic.