I can barely bring myself to write the word given how overused it has been of late 🤐🙄😯😕🙃 But I gotta say something! If we have found ourselves currently in a place where every second (or indeed single!) patient has a ‘histamine issue’ then I am afraid that it is we, that have an issue.
Because it would suggest that we have all become ‘hammers’ and we view every gut, every skin, every female repro story as the result of exactly the same ‘nail’. This is simply not true. And in those instances where the call is correct and there are indeed ‘histamine issues’ at play – these are overwhelmingly downstream of the true cause & real reasons for this. That’s right, reduced tolerance of exogenous histamine – a combination of dietary and microbial production, is considered primary, in an estimated 3% of the population. The rest of our patients who present with this are also presenting with signs and symptoms that speak to a bigger gut story that is begging to be read – beyond the histamine headline!
Further muddying the waters is the much talked about but still mostly misunderstood bidirectional relationship between Oestrogen & Histamine.
I am neither an outright ‘Histamine Denier’ (fact check: 7 years ago I created, Are You Missing Histamine Excess?) nor refuting that a relationship between the two can exist in some individuals. But one does not simply = the other. More does not always equate to more on either side of that equation and the primary site of this interplay between the two is in the CNS and potentially the reproductive tissues not the gut. The ‘low histamine diet’ is this season’s black it would seem, or a new inception of the anti-candida diet of the 80s-90s that YES! people feel better on because of all the vast improvements this constitutes generally over their baseline food intake!
Either way – when we imagine we see that ‘same issue’ everywhere we look – that should be a prompt to take a good look at our diagnostic reasoning, and undertake a review for possible misunderstandings, ensure we’re not missing the messages our patients’ presentations are really trying to send us and falling for a case of Mistaken Identity!
What’s Hiding Behind Histamine – Part 1
Dietary histamine and its metabolic manager DAO have been getting a lot of attention of late. In this episode we take a step back, to take in the bigger picture and upstream story that typically explains downstream DAO compromise in our patients. The overwhelming majority of our patients experiencing histamine intolerance have secondary histaminosis and that means we must seek the primary issue and treat the real cause and along the way avoid Misunderstandings, Missed Messages and a case of Mistaken Identity.
You can purchase What’s Hiding Behind Histamine – Part 1 here. If you are an Update in Under 30 Subscriber, you will find it waiting for you in your online account. You can become an Update in Under 30 Subscriber to access this episode and the entire library of Update in Under 30 audios and resources here.