In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, you’re going to learn a lot you probably didn’t know about histamine. Turns out histamine is a major neurotransmitter that affects your awareness, food cravings, tiredness and inflammation. I’m talking with Dr. Becky Campbell, a board-certified doctor of natural medicine who focuses on histamine issues based on experiences from her patients and her own life.
Histamine is a very important part of the immune system and plays a role in inflammation in the body. We also need histamine in order to digest food, move our bowels, boost exercise performance, increase attention, and get blood as well as nutrients and oxygen delivered to different parts of the body. But things can go off track.
Histamine intolerance is not a sensitivity to histamine, but an indication that too much of it has built up in the body, or that there is an inability to break it down properly.
So, how could high histamine affect you?
“Migraines, passing out,” Dr. Campbell says. “Eating and having a really fast heart rate for no reason, having anxiety out of the blue for no reason. Any type of dermatitis, or hives, or flushing, random diarrhea, going from sitting to standing and getting dizzy. It’s all over the place.”
Fatigue immediately after eating also can be an indicator. “My biggest symptom of histamine intolerance is fatigue,: Dr. Campbell says. “I would eat something that was supposedly healthy for me, like fermented food, and literally felt like I took a sleeping pill.”
It’s a natural response for our body to release histamine, but if we can’t break it down (which can happen from reduced enzyme activity, various gut issues, from vitamin deficiencies and more) it becomes a problem. She shares what foods to avoid and what foods to eat when you’re dealing with histamine intolerance.
The most common high histamine foods include pork, citrus, fermented foods, alcohol, and aged meats and cheeses. If you eat a high histamine food and your body isn’t prepared to break it down, the mast cells that produce it (and other inflammatory chemicals) can just pour it out into the body, resulting in a lot of inflammation.
Dr. Campbell estimates up to 40 percent of people could have some degree of histamine sensitivity. Vitamin C, quercetin and zinc can help.
If you know (or maybe are beginning to think) high histamine negatively affects you, Dr. Becky gives you some great tips so you can identify symptoms and histamine culprits in your diet, and start finding solutions.
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Follow Along with the Transcript
How to Get a Handle on Your Histamine – Dr. Becky Campbell with Dave Asprey – #811
Links/Resources
Website: drbeckycampbell.com/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/DrBeckyCampbell
Instagram: www.instagram.com/drbeckycampbell/
Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrBeckyCampbell
YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCMV5JjJ-tR24TFABiuPCOtg/featured
Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/drbeckycampbell/
Book: “The 4-Phase Histamine Reset Plan: Getting to the Root of Migraines, Eczema, Vertigo, Allergies and More”
Key Notes
- Histamine is a major neurotransmitter that affects your awareness, your food cravings, how tired you are, how inflamed you are. – 1:01
- I started to learn about histamine, and mast cell activation syndrome. And I put it all together, and I realized that that is what I had going on. – 2:04
- What are some signs that histamine is an issue for people that they might not know about? – 2:43
- If you have good gut health, which is where most of this enzyme is created, then yeah, you don’t tend to have an issue with histamine. – 5:06
- What happens when you eat a bunch of histamine? Walking through what happens in the gut? What happens in the brain? – 6:34
- Degranulation is basically, it’s almost like imagine a cell bursting open, and histamine, and other inflammatory chemicals just pouring out. – 7:37
- If you start eating more histamine foods, you’re going to get even more inflamed. So, post-COVID, they’re really recommending a low histamine diet. – 10:05
- In my book, I have a yes, no, and maybe less, because I really try to get people to be able to eat as much as they can. – 11:56
- I think that mast activation syndrome is probably the number one cause of histamine intolerance. – 15:40
- What else in terms of supplements makes a big difference? – 16:55
- Oxalates, lectins, and histamine, in order of like, which ones are causing the worst problems in the most people. – 19:22
- If you drink bone broth, and you get food cravings, and you want ice cream afterwards, that’s not the bone broth for you. – 22:22
- White wine is the easier to tolerate versus red when you have histamine issues. – 24:50
- One of the other things that happens when people either don’t break down histamine enough in their bodies, – 25:23
- How big of a deal is POTS just in terms of incidents in the population? Do we have good data on that? – 28:25
- Sometimes, if your gut issue is driving your mast activation syndrome, or your histamine intolerance, yes, it’s blocking the H2 receptor, but it’s also leading into more of a gut issue. – 36:06
- I have mast cell activation syndrome, and with mast cell activation syndrome, the wind can blow too hard, and you have a reaction. – 39:51
- I have MTHFR, and I take the methylated folate, and I take the Methylcobalamin, but I also need to take a little niacin sometimes to calm me down too, so it works well. – 43:22
- I’m a big chart person. And my book have tons of charts, and they actually break it down by high-histamine foods, histamine-liberating foods, and DAO-enzyme reducing foods – 44:11
- Apple cider vinegar is the lowest histamine, lowest mycotoxin, lowest all toxin vinegar by orders of magnitude. – 45:55
- Let’s take a couple of questions from the Upgrade Collective, and then we’re going to cut over to our friends on Clubhouse, and do a couple questions there. – 46:32
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