when is a menopause symptom NOT a menopause symptom?

...when it's actually a histamine-intolerance issue!

Estrogen irregularities set off histamine problems.  Environmental chemicals set off histamine problems.  Tyramines and salicylates set off histamine problems.

Every time I get those nasty pseudo-feverish feelings these days, I review what I ate in the past half-dozen hours.  It doesn't happen ACUTELY very often anymore because I try to be cautious in my eating.  When we visit restaurants, though, we can never be sure of what kind of additives may be put into the hamburgers or rubbed on the steaks. 

A lot of people would advocate not eating out regularly, but for some of us it isn't practical to ALWAYS cook for ourselves.  And there's only so long one can snack one's meals with cheese, boiled eggs, nuts, and dried meats; to survive an airplane flight, yes, but more than a day is inclined to drive me to ANYTHING hot and savory!  Coping strategies are in order.

If, despite how careful you are to avoid foods to which you're sensitive, you get those uncomfortable feelings in the hours after a meal, your best friend could be benedryl.  It's an antihistamine available over-the-counter in the US, but alas other countries often require a prescription I hear.  :-(  The next best thing I've found is less intuitive -- NICOTINE GUM.  It has anti-inflammatory properties as well as antihistamine ones.  I have also tried the diamine-oxidase supplement DAOSIN (it's like Histame), but compared to diphenhydramine and nicotine, it's pretty wimpy.

I heard an interesting hypothesis recently -- someone observed that though smoking rates are low here, there is no diminution of teens STARTING, and opined that they're getting a vitamin-B boost from it that they need.  I might offer a counter-suggestion -- perhaps the hormonal storms of adolescence are causing histamine reactions which are tamed by the nicotine in cigarette smoke.  I DO know that the beneficial qualities of nicotine have long been known, but they've been downplayed.  To announce a GOOD side of cigarette smoking is not going to help when you're trying to get people to STOP.  By using the gum or patch, though, you avoid the admittedly-nasty tar and toxins you get when pulling smoke into your lungs intentionally.

So when I feel the suspicious weariness or downright SLEEPINESS, or the puffy hands/feet, or the hot-flash after consuming something questionable, I reach for the benedryl or gum.  It's AMAZING how fast it helps.

HOW stupid can people be?

There's a current "funny" going around on facebook -- "i hesitate to ask anymore how dumb people can be, because some seem to see it as a challenge" or words to that effect.  But it's still a valid question!

I'm reading a very intelligent treatise on the role of food intolerance on CFS/ME, and after implying that the more perfectly people follow a diet designed to minimize known food intolerances, the better they feel, the article goes on to say that they hesitate to recommend this kind of avoidance technique! It seems that patients consider this healthful practice onerous, difficult and burdensome -- awwwww, poor things....  You CAN get significant improvement of life-limiting illness, but you're actually going to have to give up your favorite toxin!

What's the deal, here???  Is it THAT traumatic to dump wheat, or dairy, or chocolate, or whatever, in order to GET YOUR LIFE BACK?

This viewpoint points out some really screwed-up priorities!  YES, you're going to have to think and plan ahead.  Yes, you'll have to forgo some goodies MOST OF THE TIME (experience seems to point out that, once identified, trouble foods can be used on an extremely rare basis once the body has done some healing and the reaction threshold is lower).  Yes, you WILL have to exercise a certain amount of "won't-power."

There is no free lunch when it comes to wellness.  A few people (especially the young) can eat, drink and do whatever they want without noticing deleterious effects, but that doesn't apply to the majority of us, especially aging women.  I'm willing to trade regular high-histamine foods in my diet (yes, even wine) for increased well-being!  I'd rather be OFF misery-inducing treats than ON side-effect-producing pharmaceuticals!  ...  How about you?

the chicken or the egg

There are so many things which cause a body to dial back on its thyroid production and T4-to-T3 conversion!  Malnutrition (ie inadequate raw materials), illness, infection, excessive omega-6 or insufficient saturated fat, stress, a very-low-calorie diet, too-heavy exercising....  Anything which makes the body think it's in danger of hard times coming and needs to garner its resources -- a siege situation -- is enough to make it slow metabolism via the thyroid.

As i read about the assaults that "tainted" foodstuffs make (my histamine studies), and the postulated infective origins of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/ME), i can't help but connect dots until i get back to thyroid function.  (It may not be my only tool, but i DO have a hammer....)  I had already supposed that there was a chicken/egg situation going on before, and this complicates the matter further.

Bad nutrient absorption (amino acids, vitamin A, iron or B12 perhaps) because one has poor stomach-acid production due to low thyroid will lower thyroid function which will lower stomach acid which will ... ad infinitum.  Or h. pylori infection can lower stomach acid which will also ....  Or other viral, bacterial or mycoplasma issues -- whew.  All roads lead to Rome.

So for those of us who suffer from thyroid misfunction (low, high or fluctuating), does the trouble originate in a faulty body, or do infective or nutritional influences cause the poor function which snowballs into worse function?  I suspect all the above.

it WAS "the other thing" ... i think

HEADBANGONDESK

How could i have been so stupid?  I think i CAN guess what it was that set off my allergy/histamine system so badly!  It could easily have been the same thing that made my dog so sick.

Not that i know EXACTLY what it was, but it was definitely bacterial because it responded to antibiotics.  It was something that he picked up on the farm, and which i suspected might have been associated with the water-well, because that had just been repaired when we arrived in VA.  All the way home, Spenser chewed on himself, and it took me a long time to get his coat back in order (using his brush), because he was too stressed to bathe.  I continue to brush of course, and have to remove hair from it every time.  That brush must be teeming with "buggies."

Also "of course" i wash my hands after brushing him, but not just after casually touching the brush.

There are many kinds of infective agents and they can do all kinds of different things to us -- not all of which are logical and intuitive.  If i may use our dear Sidereal as an example, some of the fatigue she has suffered may have originated in a years-ago infection....

One hint that i was already a little fragile while on vacation lies in the fact that the chigger bites i suffered made huge bumps instead of the tiny ones i usually get.  My fault -- i SHOULD have hunted down a can of repellant before J and i walked the length of our son's property, and me having put on shorts that morning!  I'm lucky i didn't pick up ticks, too.

If i were not on a very-low-sugar diet, might i have gotten as sick as Spense was?  (It's not like he actually eats sugar, and he is on a grain-free diet, but the sweet-potato filler in his kibble is bound to give him blood-sugar spikes larger than my usual.)  He never was able to tell me exactly where it "hurt" but he obviously felt like shit and needed extra rest ... just like i did.  His poor little eyes got all inflamed and goopy, and his white fur is still stained from it to the point he still looks a little like the walking dead with their dark circles....

So my malaise may have been the direct descendant of his, and i didn't need antibiotics because my natural biota were able to deal with the problem.  I just had to be extra-careful of my diet and environmental contacts, as he was when he refused to eat and spent most of his time in a quiet corner.  He feels much better now, you can tell because he now enjoys a healthy appetite and a propensity to growl at J about toy-possession.

observations continue and diet purity begins again

Despite the lack of rain here, the mold reading in St. Louis is back up to high, as are the pollen levels of grass and ragweed.  Since "Dysonizing*" the entire second floor of the house and "Idylisizing" the bedroom, my allergies/histamine issues have been much better.  When i stepped out into the backyard, though, the fatigue recommenced -- the steamy, motionless air and relentless sunshine just flattened me.  I've been forgoing wine (one short Campari-and-soda yesterday) most days but had some mushrooms during the course of the week.  Heigh-ho, life is a balancing act....

My husband announced last night, over our dinner of leftovers, that he was going to start induction again today, so we're both back on the wagon.  Just as well -- with our busy year and many recent trips, my weight has inched up two or three pounds with each excursion till my "skinny" size 6 jeans are on the snug side.  (I completely wore out my "fat 8s" so there's no going back.)  So my breakfast was bulletproof coffee (and J had his favorite scramble), then we went to Schnuck's and Costco and stocked up on dietary staples:  ground beef, strip steaks, rib roast, chicken breasts and deli meat (to make breadless turkey clubs), pork rinds, eggs, cream cheese, and so on.  J is banging around the kitchen as i type this, concocting meatloaf.  There's both a duckling and a rack of lamb thawing in the sink.

Compare this to how i USED to feel going on a diet before LCHF!  Dread and a grim tightening of the belt, as i anticipated hunger and dissatisfaction, and miserable hours on the treadmill or stationary bicycle.  Thank all the gods that i got curious about that Atkins guy!
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* OMG i can't believe how much dust and hair that machine can pick up!  i've been using a vintage Kirby, and it's been completely put to shame.  The two bedside rugs from the rarely-used best guest room yielded as much debris to the Dyson as our bedroom historically surrendered to the old vacuum....

is it this, that or the other thing?

Frustratingly, my allergy issues are continuing, despite my attempts to minimize histamine triggers.  I'm glad that our area has a very good resource to help track environmental irritants -- most cities probably have some such resource, but i seem to recall that the one i accessed in Salt Lake City wasn't nearly as good as St. Louis'....

Last night after i turned out my reading-lamp, i got up again and visited the "medicine cabinet" one last time, taking an additional dose of my anti-inflammatory systemic enzymes and even a squirt of nasal decongestant to prophylactically combat the irritation of my sinus passages.  This morning i woke with gummy eyes, and the tender throat that confirms the drainage issues that were irritating my stomach yesterday.  During allergy season, "it's always something."  :-P  The DOH website says the mold levels are still "moderate" but that ragweed- and grass-pollens have moved into "high."

I'm going to have to be even more of a purist with my diet today, and probably use the neti-pot more, too.  Nothing gets rid of internal pollutants (of nasal passages) better!  More tea-tree-oil-laden steam as the gentlest form of "sterilizing" the sinuses.  Perhaps the addition of zinc lozenges for the throat.  NO WINE (i had a little syrah with my steak last night) -- but i reserve the option of some Campari for the sake of my stomach.  The mushrooms waiting in the fridge will have to wait a little longer, and "real" cheese is out of the question.  GOK what i'll make for supper -- white meat poultry with a cream sauce of some sort would probably be the least burdensome, and carrots Vichy...?

At least the weather forecast is for dry, very warm weather.  That won't inhibit the pollen, but the mold situation should get better!

perfect timing for histamine study

Oi gevals (did i spell that right?) -- if i NEEDED a "perfect storm" situation for observing histamine-related malaise, nature certainly decided to cooperate with me....  Sunday was a normal summer day when it came to environmental pollen and mold but the count doubled overnight, and on Monday i felt like death-warmed-over!  I woke up feeling a LITTLE better yesterday, but in midafternoon my stomach joined my sinuses in their land of unhappiness, and i chose to fast for the rest of the day.

This morning i'm feeling better -- hope it lasts!  At least the mold-count is coming down.  I also got two nights of sound sleep, as i've been cheating and adding earplugs to my eye-mask (if the dog or husband wake me at all, i tend to have a difficult time getting back to sleep).  I took a 24-hour fexofenadine instead of 4-to-6-hour-effective diphenhydramine last night before bed too (yesterday i woke up unable to breathe through my nose).  And as we know, allergy/histamine effects are cumulative.

We also know that EVERYTHING we eat (or think about eating) gives us a certain amount of histamine response!  I wrote before how i agree with J Stanton that fasting can actually feel good -- add to that ghrelin effect the histamine-reduction from fasting, and you significantly reduce some burdens if you're inclined to suffer allergic symptoms!  Once one is ketoadapted, eating nothing CAN make one feel better than anything else ... for awhile, anyway.

I did my best to feel better naturally, across-the-board -- staying out of the basement, using my neti-pot, inhaling tea-tree-oil-laden steam, taking serrapeptase as a systemic anti-inflammatory and encouraging stomachic happiness with the help of old-fashioned bitters.  Tiny steps, but they help.  At least i woke up breathing this morning.  ;-)

tying it all together

 What people call "having a life" can really disrupt one's train of thought.  ;-)  I was chugging right along on the subject of histamine/tyramine when a distraction or two caused me to lose control of the mental plates i was juggling  and CRASH -- the shards of ideas lying around my feet are quite a mess i need to clean up!

The short version is, when our bodies can't process properly what we put into them, repercussions spread far and wide.  Anything that hints to our bodies that things aren't going well causes stress hormones to rise and thyroid levels to fall.  Such simple things as too much exercise or glucose-yielding foods, environmental mold, extremes in temperature, and foods for which we don't reliably produce the right breakdown enzymes can set off a cascade of different symptoms.

To be fair, it's not surprising that doctors don't know how to diagnose a lot of the illnesses they see until they have a good deal of experience -- especially considering how many textbooks seem to be written by purveyors of pharmaceuticals, disease seems to be a kind of drug-deficiency to a lot of people.  The old days of young medicos going into practice with old-timers, thus having a sort of in-the-field apprenticeship, would appear to be over; doing apprenticeships in hospitals (as interns and residents) where illness is more of an acute situation wouldn't seem as sound a background for someone with an eye to General Practice.  Because of the current system, we end up with excellence in dealing with trauma and we totally suck at promoting actual WELLNESS.  If the difficulty can't be sewn up, cut out or killed with antibiotics, or if the dis-ease is too subtle or generalized, the medical industry doesn't know what to do with it.

And wellness is exactly what a lot of us want to be pursuing, in the paleo/primal/WAPF blogosphere!  This is why those of us whose difficulties can't be sewn up, etc., have turned into renegades and iconoclasts and have turned our backs on the mainstream medicine which is not interested in our goal.

If we want to be as healthy as possible, we HAVE to define what's best for us, usually by trial and error.  Then when that line is defined, we have to toe it to the best of our ability, realizing that every excursion from it causes pain and suffering commensurate with how far out of bounds we have let ourselves go.  Some can have the occasional "fling" with nutritional good-for-nothings and experience minimal repercussions, while others flirt with anaphylaxis merely by light exposure to some substances.  Some can have a "forbidden" treat occasionally, and others find one cookie can put them on the slippery slope.  It's all highly individual.

Having become alerted to how bad high-histamine foods can make me feel and the range of possible symptoms, i've started to notice histamine-related responses more.  This is a good thing!  Like other kinds of allergy, these responses are cumulative.  Balancing range-of-tolerance of foods with environmental conditions can make a huge difference to daily quality of life.

Robust thyroid function allows for the kind of energy that makes life worth living, and thyroid function can be tweaked hugely with diet.  ENOUGH of the foods which are good for the thyroid, like animal protein, and saturated and O3 fats, helps immensely, and excessive calorie-restriction is guaranteed to reduce production.  MINIMIZING what inhibits and puts excessive demand on our systems is equally important -- contrary to what euthryroid athletes believe, carbohydrates require more hormone to process and so put a strain on our resources.  Omega-6 fats make it difficult to get thyroid into our cells for use, and MUST be strictly limited.  Our digestive inadequacies make it doubtful that we can properly absorb or convert the critical nutrients we HAVE to acquire, and some kinds of supplementation can be mandatory.

Not only are grains and legumes problematic by way of the gut-damaging lectins they contain, but they also carry a large histamine load.  Large histamine load EQUALS stress, and stress causes us to produce, convert and use thyroid hormones in a less-than-optimal way.  Looking at the list of symptoms suffered by the histamine/tyramine-sensitive is almost a mirror of those experienced by the thyroid-challenged among us.

Tyramine is a breakdown product of tyrosine, which is the building-block of thyroid hormone (along with iodine) -- this was the point in my research where i was interrupted, and where i need to start regathering the tangled threads of ideas i was weaving.  When meat and fish have been processed for preservation (or simply kept around too long), some of the health-giving amino acid gets too far gone -- past tyrosine and into the irritating tyramine which behaves like those nasty histamines, setting off the alarms in our bodies which are so uncomfortable.  I strongly suspect that a lot of thyroid malfunction (both hypO and hypER) is inextricably entangled with this process.

kids, it ain't the sodium

It happens all the time -- to my husband, to my daughter, to friends -- they go out and celebrate with their friends and family, then the next morning they step on the scale and exclaim that they've put on WHOLE POUNDS.  How could this possibly have happened?!

Having observed this phenomenon for pushing-a-half-century myself, the short answer is "it ain't fat."  People don't put on fat that fast -- i suspect it's physically impossible to store adipose tissue at such a rate even if one is actually trying to do it.  For years i would have said it's salt-induced water retention, then in my late-twenties and early-thirties (when i first began reading about how dieting works) i would have said that when we store or take carbohydrate out of storage, we can get big swings in our weight, because every gram of carb is tucked away with three or four grams of water which is either tied up or freed up very easily.  These two factoids, along with the realization of monthly swings of water retention, were behind my relaxed attitude toward several-pound fluctuations in weight for decades.  One is "officially" one's lowest weight (never measured except first thing in the morning, after peeing), but that higher weight was at least acknowledged.

When i first went on Atkins around a decade ago, my weight steadied out in a way it NEVER had before; he explained it in terms that were just an elaboration of what i already knew.  When i went out for a restaurant meal and ended up bloated, it just HAD to be about the salt, or maybe there were insidiously hidden carbs....  It wasn't till i moved on to ultra-low-carb primal-style eating that i suspected there was something more to it.  I had switched to sea-salt and i wasn't afraid to use it, because the explanation came about insulin itself causing water retention ... and besides, i didn't notice deleterious effects of generous usage at home.  It was only eating out that made me all puffy like the bad old days!  So maybe it wasn't actually SALT -- maybe it was another sodium-based compound? i asked myself but hadn't really begun to explore when...

it ain't the salt, and it ain't the sodium per se (although the sodium benzoate and sodium sulfite might be contributors).  That nasty bloated puffy feeling one gets after even the best-quality and most-innocent-seeming restaurant meal is all about the histamine load ... which is "always" higher away from home because of how food has to be handled in an industrial setting.  Eat a "fresh" food at home, and an identical one in a commercial establishment, and the latter is bound to give you a bigger jolt of the old bioamines.

Authorities on the subject tell us that eating ANYTHING -- even thinking about eating -- is enough to start our bodies producing endogenous histamines.  They're neurotransmitters, after all, which regulate a stunning array of normal bodily processes ... like digestion and appetite.  It's an unfortunate coincidence that allergic problems use the same pathways and we begin to associate histamine-response to pathological-histamine-response (just like we do with physiological vs pathological insulin resistance)....

But despite the care restaurant kitchens have to take for the sake of good hygiene -- or even because of it (think "preservatives") -- it's common to come away from one of their meals toting a bigger histamine response than one gets at home.  They're likely to use high-histamine ingredients like wheat flour, bean-gums, tomato-paste and spices in such a way that most home-cooks don't.

So when you feel waterlogged and horrified by the scale's reading after what you THOUGHT was a pretty innocent restaurant meal, just remember that your body is just trying to protect you -- those distended and more-permeable veins all over your body are making every effort to get blood and white cells where they're needed.  They don't care if you feel puffy and uncomfortable; they're trying to warn you that there are ingredients in the aged cheese or preserved meat (etc) that your body finds a bit toxic.  Add stress, heat-and-humidity, red wine or beer, and anchovies, and your pizza might turn into the kind of perfect storm that will make you REALLY sick.

histamine reading continues....

While eating a lot of the wrong things myself, i continue to read about theoretically controlling histamine....  :-)  Today's brunch was a really yummy platter of preserved meats (sausage, confit, headcheese, bresaola, ...), goat brie, pickled vegetables and a couple glasses of champagne, and i paid the price -- feeling miserably bloated sitting on the sunny side of the car, and having to soap my ring off when i got home.

I have no doubt that some of my allergy problems are in fact histamine-intolerance issues.  When i first read about the subject a couple of years ago, it rang a bell (set off an alarm clock actually), but something distracted me and i'm only just getting back to it.  This time i'll make every effort to stick with it a little better.

On the way home from the restaurant, though, we stopped by the neighborhood health-food store and i picked up a bottle of holy-basil tincture and at home i took a dropperful -- felt better pretty quickly.  Gonna use it for a little while in place of benedryl and see how it works in the long term.

Well, back to the reading ... but just have to gripe a bit about the people who write on the subject!  OBVIOUSLY know diddly-squat about the subject of nutrition because they seem scared to death they're going to give themselves a case of malnutrition by omitting "whole food groups" -- where have we heard THAT before?  ;-)  ...Unless of course they're talking about giving up MEAT* -- that IS a mistake!
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* and the proclamation against "red meat" is based on the factoid that "Red Meats are hardest on us as they are usually from animals who had antibiotics injected or were force fed etc."  also that they're supposedly very high in omega-6s -- i guess these people don't know about grassfed....

new clues to encourage a happier body

A couple of days ago a new realization filtered into my brain....  The way Dr. Donaldson ("Strong Medicine") designed his dietary recommendations, his approved food list ("allergy bandwagon" he called it) turned out to be LOW HISTAMINE.

I read a little bit about the question a couple of years ago, but while doing the program it didn't occur to me -- i have no idea why it popped into consciousness now.  But yeah -- freshly grinding a beef chuck into burger and cooking it the same day decidedly gives you a smaller histamine dose than buying that family pack of ground beef.  A lot of the foods Donaldson frowned on are high in histamine irritation:  wheat, tomatoes (all nightshades in fact), citrus, strawberries, chocolate....  It seems also that some foods which give me hypothyroid symptoms -- sauerkraut leaps out -- are also high in the nasty bioamine, too.

Oh, and also those "neolithic agents of disease" grains, legumes and polyunsaturated (ie. rancid) seed oils.

I think it's highly likely that i'll feel much better by trying to minimize histamine-containing foods in my diet.  According to "thelowhistaminechef.com" one of the huge number of histamine-intolerance symptoms is trouble with the thyroid.  Gotta read up more....

The worst part of this is that red wine falls into the "avoid" category.  :-(