I will start with saying I am not a scientist. And this is not medical advice. But over the course of the last 15 years, I have had to learn to dig through the science for the connections, in order to make my life tolerable, because the medical establishment has been nearly useless to my struggles, where I have managed to be pretty unbelievably successful at finding a path toward healing.
A lot of what floats around on the internet suggests elimination diets in reference to histamine issues. I have MCAD (mast cell activation disorder) sorts of issues, and have had all my life. And the standard advice doesn't work. At least it doesn't for me.
One problem is that all the lists of foods to avoid are based primarily on people's self reported patterns, so any given reaction isn't all that consistently applied to all other people, and might have been a misdiagnosis of cause. And food quality is a major issue, as well. The same food fresh is much less likely to be a problem than it is when old, but our grocery phenomenon in this country means that we are very likely to be eating only old foods, and at best, randomly old foods, which haven't been treated the way our ancestors treated foods.
I will give you a personal example of why this advice to avoid histamine foods isn't right for me.
Fermented foods.
One of the tests of a theory that I have developed in evaluating the crack pots from the people who might be onto something is to measure it against our history as a species. All these people are busy saying that folks with histamine issues need to avoid fermented foods.
But ancient people rejected foods that tended to kill people very often. So why is it that almost every culture on the planet has developed fermentation of some sort and considered it a staple food, long before organized agriculture and our modern food system?
Ancient peoples didn't tend to keep eating things that killed people. And anaphylaxis is a pretty immediate and obviously attributable way to die, even if you don't understand it scientifically.
So how come they didn't reject fermented foods, if people were dying of them? I think the answer is that people weren't dying from them. Do they have histamine? Yes, probably. But we put ourselves in peril when we oversimplify too far. And saying that simply because a food has histamine, it should be avoided, is a pretty big simplification.
There are people whose systems are so extremely out of whack, that they probably do need to avoid a lot of that list while they try to address the vitamin and mineral chaos carnival going on in their body, because they are too hyper-raective to everything, from being so extremely out of balance.
But there are a lot of good things in some of those histamine foods, and in many cases, some of the elements that help people process histamines, like the magnesium our system needs for nearly everything, the vitamin C in a lot of fruits, and so on.
So, what about fermented foods? We know that it breaks down anti-nutrients, which should be a good thing for a lot of foods. We know that it is good for gut flora. Lots of good stuff. And just this week, it's been announced that they've found a kind of gut flora that eats GABA.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2095769-gut-bacteria-spotted-eating-brain-chemicals-for-the-first-time/
So what if this is just the beginning of understanding the dance in our gut flora, all the things they eat and produce for each other. What if your histamine problem is really a lack of these little critters that are supposed to be eating well from your whole foods diet and from the chemistry created by the other organisms eating from your whole foods diet?
A concept that we talk a lot about in Permaculture growing is the idea that when your garden is eaten up by grasshoppers, you do not have an excess of grasshoppers, like our overly reductive reasoning tends to suggest. You instead have a deficiency of birds and lizards that create a balanced ecosystem.
Apply that idea to your gut flora. You need to figure out what your systemic equivalent of chickens and lizards is, and provide that to the community to repair the imbalance you're living with.
I have had this point driven home especially this week, because I have just been able to start eating fermented foods again after a gi test that required me to stay away from them for a few weeks.
Everyone and their uncle has told me not to eat fermented foods if I have histamine issues. But it just didn't jive with history and sense to me. So I ignored them, and a few years back, started making my own ferments, while staying on antihistamines for a few months, out of an excess of caution, to help me figure out if this was something I could use safely.
So, in order to figure out the details of whatever is still going on in my gut, having not perfected the whole mess yet, I went without something I had been using to keep the wheels on the bus and my pain issues in check for a few years now. It really sucked for the duration to do without, and all sorts of other symptoms came back during that time.
I don't have all the answers yet, but yesterday and today, I have been able to eat fermented foods again. And it is clear that fermented foods are helping me with my deficiency of birds and lizards in some very important ways in this puzzle. I am still suffering deficiency of some things I haven't found yet, but it is clear that fermented foods, despite their histamine are part of healing for me.
I had an initial reaction of some esophagitis symptoms, upon restarting the fermented foods. But it was not too significant, and suddenly, within half an hour, many of my other symptoms started to subside again, across various systems. I suspect if it were somehow stabilizing mast cells, it wouldn't have happened so fast. I suspect that some of those critters are somehow able to use the leaking histamine in my system to do something more productive, and it is modulating my immune system in the process.
Given that studies have proven at this point, that GABA is part of the histamine regulation process in rats, it makes perfect sense to me that some of our gut flora are there to create, manage and destroy GABA, as well as many other things. I can't go back in history and undo all the damage from stress and antibiotics, and whatever else. But I can do things to restock the system.
In my personal process through this, at first I couldn't tell if it was helping me, a few years back. All I could detect was some immediate symptom increase. It took a long time, and dialing the chaos down in a lot of ways, detoxing a lot of the mess with a really healthy autoimmune paleo diet, some supplement support in a few places and a lot of emotional healing over the years to get to this place. I imagine I am not alone, and a lot of people have walked away from fermented foods upon some initial reaction, but perhaps prematurely. Today, I don't need antihistamines. I haven't taken one in months. And the fermented foods are helping to modulate my system.
I have also been reading a book about Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, due to a family member living through that hell. And one of the things it points out is that the benzodiazepine drugs (Valium, Ambien, Xanax, etc) have a dramatic impact on GABA. The one time I tried Valium, it was a miserable experience. And my surgeon for my upcoming knee surgery wanted to give me Ambien. I was already looking into it with much trepidation, when I read in the Alzheimer's book that people who have EVER used one of this class of medication are 50% more likely to develop dementia.
Okay, now circle back to gut flora. So what if all of our systemic drug hacking is basically feeding all the wrong things, and causing complete systemic chaos? What if that is at the core of most of our chronic disease?
By using single target meds, we're destabilizing a complex web of interconnections, starving some flora, feeding others, and creating chaos, much like we do in the garden, when we try to poison the grasshoppers out of existence.
So what is the answer? For me, it has been as much of a chemical and food related return to our evolutionary path as possible. I am not completely rejecting the modern world. I am still going to go through with the knee surgery, but I am certainly not taking Ambien as part of the experience. And I think those of you fighting mast cell issues, should understand that your gut flora being diverse and healthy is what helps you modulate your GABA, and therefore histamines and neurotransmitters, and much of your glandular function, too.
It's a start that all of us with autoimmune have started looking at what foods we need to eliminate (damaged, corporate foods), but we need to avoid losing focus on the foods we need to add when that is possible, too. If it is something that existed in your evolutionary path longer than agriculture, there is probably a reason, and something it is doing for you.
It takes time for your T cells to forget all the reactive foods. It takes time for your different types of T cells to re-balance. There is a lot to this whole process. But a consistent pattern is that it's hard to heal on too few resources, or when drugs are artificially pegging particular substances in our system. There are times when it makes sense, times when it is the only option. But I have learned to look with skepticism at the medicinal tools offered to us, and to hesitate before removing things that we've used for millennia, when I can find no evidence about how or why those things would have changed.
We hadn't eaten wheat for long as a culture, and screwed it up a lot in recent history with GMOs and breeding for all the wrong things, failing to ferment it, etc. So eliminating that one makes perfect sense. But I can ferment something that is a wild food, the way people for millennia have fermented them, and nothing will have changed about that food, from the way my ancestors ate it, so it seems wiser to me to look at what has changed in me, and how to find the balance needed to manage that change, and add back in the thing my ancestors relied on, that hasn't changed, along with all the omega-3 foods, vitamin C foods, and other tools I am using to manage my histamine reactions and improve the process.
Please understand that you should be very careful hacking your system, and talk to your doctor before making big changes. But my hope is that at least you will think more about the patterns and the history in making choices going forward. If you need to, fire your doctor and find one who will listen and talk through ideas. But always keep thinking about the trade offs and patterns, and whether this is a deviation from all of the patterns that made us well for millennia.
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