If you’ve ever wondered if you had a histamine intolerance, chances are good that you’ve done a little research in that area. And if you gave a moose a muffin, chances are good that google displayed an array of articles that all give you a list of foods to avoid – “high histamine” foods. Furthermore, chances are good that these articles are mostly contradictory – don’t eat tuna, it’s high histamine; but tuna is sometimes fine. But avoid dried fruits. But here’s a study that says dried fruits are fine. And…
I can help with that. Understanding histamine, histamine sensitivity, and what to do about it, is fairly easy – but you just need to unpack it first. So, let’s.
The first “light bulb” is to understand what histamine is, and where it comes from: histamine is a “a biogenic amine, a small molecule that acts as a neurotransmitter and chemical mediator.” (Gemini) But you don’t have to understand the complexities behind all that – I don’t: what you need to understand is this: histamine is a signalling chemical (very much like a hormone) that tells your body “inflammation. now!”
Where does it come from? It comes from your own cells (immune system), if elicited, but in the context of food… drum roll please… it comes from bacteria. It’s a by-product of bacterial activity.
If you’ve never heard of that, this should blow your mind: in other words, there’s no such thing as “high histamine foods.” There’s only “foods that tend to have bacteria in them that give off histamine, sometimes, if those histamine-producing bacteria win the race to colonize that food.”
There’s another term that you might commonly associate with histamine, even though you didn’t know it: “food poisoning” (*not all types of food poisoning) Most food poisoning – i.e. leaving pizza overnight on the counter, etc., is simply caused by allowing food to sit in warm bacteria-friendly environments, which then spawns bacterial activity… which then – depending on which bacteria have multiplied – give off histamine. You eat that histamine, and wham – INFLAMMATION signalling goes off in your gut. Barfing. Stomach pains. The works out both ends. (Which is handy to know: as you’ll see, you can neutralize this kind of food poisoning should it occur).
Now, you have histamine popping up in your body all the time – go ahead and scratch your arm right now: those red marks are histamine being released in response. Your body binds (neutralizes) histamine with an enzyme called “Diamine Oxidase” (aka DAO). Not enough DAO means you’ll experience continued inflammation, until that histamine gets naturally swept out – usually not good. DAO = good. There’s essentially no such thing as too much DAO = if it doesn’t encounter histamine, it’ll just quietly pass through without doing anything.
Your body handles histamine in two “compartments”: (1) the histamine in your bloodstream: histamine in your bloodstream is handled by your kidneys, which produce the requisite DAO; (2) the histamine in your gut: histamine in your gut is neutralized by small cell structures on your gut lining called “micro-villi” – essentially, the little hair-like “glob” structures on your gut lining that increase surface area and perform absorption (and a zillion other things).
This is important, and tells us two things: #1: we know that kidneys are high in DAO; and #2: we know that an injured gut won’t be able to produce DAO well. If you get too much histamine in an injured gut: you’re out of luck.
Let’s introduce another term: exogenous histamine – this just means “histamine that came from ‘out there’ that you ate.” Remember: histamine is just a bacterial by-product. This means you can experience a dump of gut histamine two ways: (1) exogenous histamine (eating it, in the food), and (2) your own gut bacteria. In other words, if your gut is colonized by unfriendly histamine-producing bacteria, you can eat a zero-histamine diet, and still get blown away by histamine when your own gut bacteria start get to work.
This brings us to the crux of the topic: what do we do about a histamine intolerance? Google proffers you one solution: a “low histamine diet.” But now that you understand the basics of how histamine works, and where it comes from, you realize why this won’t work: it’s a complete dice roll where your histamine is coming from, and it’s literally impossible to ensure reliability: you could be eating a “low histamine food” that got colonized by histamine-producing bacteria – whoops; high histamine! you could eat a food with zero histamine – but lo! your gut bacteria colony begins eating and there’s another histamine dump! There’s absolutely no dependable way to avoid histamine.
However: you can neutralize histamine, with DAO. But: catch-22: if you’re injured, you can’t effectively produce DAO. However, if you can’t effectively produce DAO, you’ll never heal, because histamine will remain active in the gut, preventing healing – and eventually, with consistently high histamine levels, gut bacteria that’s friendly to histamine (likely histamine-producing bacteria) will begin to colonize the gut. You can’t avoid histamine; but you can neutralize it.
How?
If your leg breaks, you need a cast and crutches until your leg heals. In this case, your injury is your gut – and your gut needs “crutches” until it can heal.
In this case, the “crutch” is exogenous DAO – i.e. DAO that you eat, to neutralize the histamine sitting in your gut. This breaks the catch-22: by eating DAO, the histamine gets neutralized, allowing your gut’s micro-villi to heal. Supplement DAO for 6-12 months: the good news is that DAO now comes in supplement form! (it didn’t when I had my initial Long Covid crash).
Even better: eat a dice-sized cube of animal kidney every day, 2x daily, for that same amount of time. Not only will it take care of histamine, but it will help your gut heal so that it can take care of the histamine itself!
Now, there is one food you can always count on to for-sure have histamine: Balsamic Vinegar. Because of how it’s made, Balsamic Vinegar is far-and-away the highest food of any in histamine. This is a good thing: you should feed your kids Balsamic Vinegar, because it will help condition their guts to produce alot of DAO (another fun fact: pregnant women have massively-higher amounts of DAO from their placenta – which is why many pregnant women report that their autoimmune conditions are lessened or vanish during their pregnancy). This is good to know: if you want to diagnose your histamine sensitivity (and you’re willing to hurt a little bit), eat a little Balsamic Vinegar: 24-48 hours, if you’re bloated and in pain, you now know why.
Let me finish by telling you a story: I had my initial celiac meltdown in August 2021 – I found myself blacking out, losing consciousness. I later found out it was full-blown celiac – literally off the charts (for the autoantibody test: 1-4 = likely gluten-sensetive; 4-15 = likely celiac: I was somewhere off the charts, above 450. And didn’t come back on the charts for another 8 months). Thereafter, I had a constant “burn” in my upper-center gut area (duodenum area) – it felt like I had overdosed on hot sauce. A constant dull pain. I tried everything to get rid of the pain: you name it, I tried it.
Then, one day, I did a deep-dive into histamine. It struck me that this pain might be histamine-related: who knows? At this point, I searched, and couldn’t find any DAO supplements, no luck. But maybe I could find animal kidney?
I found one. We had a male goose that was attacking the kids, and I decided it was lights-out for that one: just in time for Thanksgiving. As I was butchering it, I realized those little bean-shaped things were goose kidneys. Hey! Kidneys! Without hesitation (tells you something about my diet) I popped both raw kidneys in my mouth, chomp chomp. Fast forward.
The next day, I woke up: something was strange. Different. Then it hit me: my omnipresent pain was GONE. The pain that I had had for almost two years and couldn’t get rid of: gone overnight.
I was jubilant. Within a few days, the pain was back, but now I knew what to do, and sure enough, it worked. I got a hold of deer, pig, lamb, and cow kidneys, and at a dice-sized amount of raw animal kidney every day, for 8 months. Since then, if my gut ever gets injured – back to the kidneys. It works, every time – because even if it’s not a special histamine “intolerance,” if there’s an injury, there’s histamine, and DAO helps. And now you know why.
