The Histamine Diet

I hate the idea of going on a “diet”. Weight-loss diet? Eh, fine, eating less isn’t too bad, but a food intolerance diet? I hate the idea of being “that guy” asking the poor waiter a plethora of questions about the menu because I can’t eat anything on it. I don’t want to make a big deal, or any deal, of it. How many times have I tried to plan a get-together lunch but Becky can’t have gluten and Johnny doesn’t eat fish and Janie is a vegetarian and Marcus is lactose Intolerant and you know what? Let’s just drink water for lunch. Oh wait, Nate can’t have more than 16 oz of water a day.

Sigh.

It’s so hard.

Not to get too deep in the wormhole, but I get it: we as a people now have crazy options when it comes to food and with those crazy options comes a difficulty in choice. Whereas we used to eat dried meat, canned peaches, and bread like it or lump it, we now have all these options and our bodies are wondering what the heck it’s supposed to do with it all. Nobody’s body is good at everything.

All this is to say, this article isn’t about to make going out to eat with friends any easier.

I fought the idea of a diet to help with my allergies for so long, but I gave in and dang-it, it helps.

Here’s what I learned: did you know histamines are actually in your food? I know right? Crazy weird. I want to really dig into what histamines are and how they work later, but for now what I want to talk about is what struck me:

the histamine bucket.

Anything, even good things, can be overdone, right? Everything in moderation. That’s the basic principal of the histamine bucket. Imagine every histamine in your body as going into a bucket, every histamine your body makes, the histamines from your food, and that if your bucket overfills, you have an allergy attack. If you are allergic to a lot of things, your body produces a lot of histamines so your bucket is already quite full. Then you eat foods high in histamines and it overflows your bucket. Antihistamines help empty your bucket, but they can only help so much. Following that theory, if you cut out high-histamine foods, you won’t overflow your histamine bucket and you wont have an allergy attack.

I apologize for the terribly shaky strokes. A little over a week ago I have a bad run-in with a mandolin (the veggie slicer, not the instrument) and now I’m down a finger on my dominant hand. Hopefully I’ll be able to redo it when the bandages are gone.

Simple, right?

The not-so- simple part is the exact science behind it. Honestly, scientists don’t know a whole lot about it yet. That’s why a lot of this histamine stuff is guess and check. I could go over exactly what a histamine is and what it does, and I probably will later, but for now I’m gonna leave you with some of my scholarly sources to check out if you want:

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17490952
  Pubmed.org is an excellent source of peer-reviewed articles. They’re not necessarily the easiest to digest, but you can trust them.
  
• http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ursus-proxy-11.ursus.maine.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=23&sid=b30db6ee-c188-4668-b879-b5ce8622e37d%40sessionmgr104
  You may have to make an account for to read this one, but it’s free and since I’ve been using it since I was in middle school, I trust it 100%
  
• https://hms.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/assets/Sites/Longwood_Seminars/2015_Longwood%20Seminar%20Allergy%20Reading%20Pack.pdf
  Harvard, when can you not trust them? I like this article because starting on page 10 it talks about what they call Oral Allergy Syndrome (OAS) and what I call tandem allergies. These are foods that have proteins in common with your allergies. For example if you’re allergic to latex, you’ll want to avoid bananas, avocado, kiwi, chestnut, and papaya. How latex and a banana share proteins I don’t know, but it’s really fascinating.
  
• http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/endocrine/otherendo/histamine.html
  This article is affiliated with Colorado State and is well referenced. This is a slightly simpler and relatively short explanation of the science behind histamines. Plus there’s a picture of a puppy of having a mild allergic reaction, so now I know what I’d look like if I were a dog. So that’s nice.

I’ve got some more in my inventory that I need to suss out a bit more before I recommend them, so that’s it for now, but it’s a good chunk of reading to read them all.

So if all this histamine intolerance stuff is new to you, stick with the histamine bucket for a bit, it’s more helpful than all this technical stuff. I find imagining my histamine bucket to be really helpful when I’m reaching for something to eat. 

Since I'm such a visual person, I also made this:

The Histamine Diet No-no Pyramid

This is not an all-inclusive list, but it coveres the building blocks of everything. For example, I ate mayo for the first week I was on this diet, but then realized there was a lot of vinegar in it... This pyramid covers all of the big stuff like ketchup (because tomatoes and vinegar) but leaves out smaller stuff that are potentially intuitive (like pickles and miso).

Once I have some more experience with all this I'll probably remake this guy, but for now I'm finding it wicked helpful!