My personal experience with histamine intolerance since I switched to a mostly carnivore diet back in May of 2022 has been a huge learning curve.
I still have histamine intolerance symptoms that rear their head from time to time, so today I’m going to share some of what I’ve learned about histamine intolerance, how it can be linked to oxalate dumping, and the ways I’ve learned to manage it.
First Up – What IS Histamine?
Histamine is a signalling molecule that sends messages between cells.
It helps keep us awake, which is a good thing, because otherwise we’d be dozing off all the time.
It causes contraction of smooth muscle tissues like the uterus or stomach.
It causes blood vessels to dilate, it can cause our heart rate to speed up, and it tells cells in our stomach to make stomach acid.
Histamine also works with our immune system to fight off invaders. These can be things that might end up in our body from the air that we breathe or the food that we eat, like parasites or harmful pathogens.
This is just a brief explanation of some of the roles of histamine in the body, but you can see already that it’s pretty important. Right?
Well Histamine is SO important that there are histamine receptors on almost every cell in the body. In fact, every system of the body has histamine receptors on almost every cell.
And knowing this is important. But we’ll be coming back to WHY it’s important in just a little bit.
Foods That Are High in Histamine
The next thing we need to know is that histamine can also be consumed in foods or in drinks, and this can also increase the histamine levels in our body.
Some foods are naturally higher in histamine. Some foods liberate histamine, and many foods will increase in histamine content with age.
For example, pork is a food that can be naturally high in histamine.
Egg whites and citrus fruits are known to be histamine liberators, which means they may make your body release more histamine when you consume them.
And aged foods such as dried or cured meats, aged cheeses and fermented foods can be high in histamine because they are aged. Coffee can also be high in histamine.
Now what about leftover foods? They come under the aged food category because foods that have been stored in the fridge can increase in histamine with time, and the longer they’re stored, the more histamine they may contain.
So eating these foods can increase your histamine levels!
What IS Histamine Intolerance?
The next thing we need to know is what histamine intolerance actually means. The term is a little misleading because it’s not really that our body is intolerant to the histamine it makes.
Basically, it is when our body has too much histamine floating around and is unable to break it down.
You see, we have what is often referred to as a ‘histamine bucket’. If all is working well in our body, histamine is produced, does its job and then is broken down by DAO or diamine oxidase. DAO is an enzyme that breaks down histamine, and I’ll talk more about DAO soon.
But when this process (the DAO breaking down the histamine) doesn’t happen as it should, histamine can build up in our body, just like water filling a bucket. Everything is fine until that histamine bucket overflows… But once it does, it causes all sorts of mayhem, and it can certainly make our lives mighty miserable!
So now let’s get into the next piece of the puzzle – inflammation.
