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Starting intermittent fasting or a new diet? If you are eating healthy foods like avocados, spinach, fermented foods and more and notice you are not feeling well, this could be the answer. Symptoms like fatigue, headaches, vertigo, eczema and more, may indicate a histamine intolerance. Bringing the details is today’s Waist Away podcast guest, Beth O’Hara, a Functional Naturopathic Practitioner with over ten years of experience!

First, let’s talk about histamine intolerance. First of all, what is it and what are some of the high histamine foods that cause this intolerance?

Why? So I started figuring things out by exactly having the issues exactly like you described. And so I was doing everything for my health and I was making bone broths. My kitchen looked like a lab because I was making all these ferments and making tea and all these things. This was be super healthy for you, but I kept getting worse and worse. And what I learned in this journey is that histamine is an inflammatory molecule on the body. It’s an essential thing in the body. We have to have histamine. And a lot of people know about histamine in terms of allergies and taking an antihistamine medication. But histamine is involved in most of the systems in the body. So it’s important in digestion and brain health and it’s involved in the skin, any part of the body you can think of. But when histamine levels get too high, that’s when we start to get these symptoms so we can think about it like a bucket. So we want the histamine levels to be kind of half way in the bucket.

You know, about halfway full. But when we’re histamine sensitive and we’re eating a lot of these high histamine foods, and those are going to be things like you describe, avocados, fermented foods, bone broth, strawberries, pineapple, any kind of packaged, processed foods are going to be higher histamine.

And there’s a whole list. So if people are experiencing the symptoms, I’ve got a really good foods list there on the website people can look at. And when those histamine levels get too high we can think about the bucket overflowing and that’s when we start to get these different kind of symptoms. We can get digestive symptoms. You can get anxiety, depression. People can get skin symptoms like reactions or rosacea is linked with it. So there’s a number of things that are associated with it. And I find that when people are starting to do things like intermittent fasting and going low carb, you start to gravitate towards a number of these foods. And then that can show us who might be more prone to histamine intolerance and mass cell issues; and who isn’t, because those aren’t necessarily bad foods. They’re just not right for some people.


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