Have you ever thought about how histamine causes inflammation and unpleasant symptoms, but we also need some histamine to live? How do we balance that? And if histamine is causing us health challenges, what are the three big ways to reduce our histamine load? Welcome to my YouTube channel.
I'm Dr. A and I talk about integrative and holistic means to deal with common complex chronic illness and other related topics. Let's get into this video about histamine. There are three primary interventions that we do with people and that people can do for themselves to help with their overall histamine load. The first one, if you are truly suffering from high histamine states, is to look at histamine triggering or high histamine foods and remove those from your diet.
Now, In the olden days, we used to have these books or handouts or whatever that we would give people or mail to them. Now you can go online, and while not every list will agree of what's higher or lower histamine, if you find a reputable online source, many universities have histamine-containing food lists, and they'll list a scale, low, medium, high. grade one to five, something like that. Take a look at the higher histamine triggering or containing foods and remove those from your diet. Now there might be things in there you really like, but if you're really bothered by histamine, let's stop the flow coming in so that we can decrease the load on our body.
Histamine is a signaling molecule that is used both in the brain and through your entire body to signal different types of activity. If we took all the histamine out of our brain... we would die because our body's regulatory mechanisms that run on histamine receptors would just shut off and you'd be dead. If you give the brain too much histamine, it can trigger a lot of things such as headaches, anxiety states, even psychotic episodes. Too much.
So we want the right amount. So if we have too much... let's try and reduce the amount that goes in the body.
Now, peripheral histamine, we think of giving us allergies, hay fever symptoms, itchiness, hives, even allergy anaphylactic syndrome, but also histamine can create joint pain and other unpleasant things. So while we need some histamine, If we're having those problems and we've decided maybe with our healthcare practitioner histamine is a piece of the puzzle, let's not take it into our body in any higher amount than we have to. So go online, look at low histamine diet or high histamine foods, either way, and just take the bigger contributors out of your diet.
So that's number one. Number two is to attend to the three elimination pathways for histamine biochemically in your body. Now, what are these three pathways?
There is an acetylation pathway that runs through anacetyltransferase. And thankfully, that is supported by vitamin B5, often known as pantothenic acid. And for decades in the integrative health community, physicians have used vitamin B5 to help with histamine issues. Now, it's not the only way out, but vitamin B5 is generally very well tolerated, and it can be a, I call it kind of the relief.
valve. Okay, now if you go back 25, 30, 40 years, we used to have an enzyme, the second enzyme we call histaminase. In modern times, you hear about DAO or diamine oxidase.
That is the same thing. Histaminase became diamine oxidase because it's more of an appropriate biochemical term. But that is the enzyme pathway to break down histamine.
It's heavily represented in your GI tract, but it's also expressed elsewhere in the body. So you can support acetylation through vitamin B5. You can support diamine oxidase through things like vitamin C. vitamin B6 and B1 and magnesium and a little bit of copper actually to help on the DAO side.
And then you've got a long winding pathway often referred to as the HMNT pathway. So that pathway doesn't just have one enzyme. So in people that are real sensitized, what I will normally do is start with the acetylation pathway through vitamin B5 and the DAO pathway either through DAO supplement or the the cofactors, and that kind of takes some of the pressure off.
It helps the histamine move out. And then the lung and winding pathway, the histamine and methyltransferase pathway, is a little tricky because the first step uses a methyl donor like methyl B12 methylfolate. But some people say, well, I take that and I get worse histamine symptoms.
Well, the reason for that is that once I take histamine and I methylate it, methyl histamine and some of my receptors can bind harder. than regular histamine. So I call it evil histamine.
It's an intermediate. Well, you think, well, why would the body do that? Well, that's because it methylates it. And then it takes to another step, which is monoamine oxidase.
The cousin of DAO is MAO. Okay. So monoamine oxidase takes methyl histamine, and much like DAO does on the other side, it converts it down to a different chemical that is an aldehyde of histamine.
Well, aldehydes of histamine are also very disturbing to your body. They're an intermediate. intermediate toxic form.
Aldehydes don't usually make you have the hives or runny nose or other stuff. Aldehydes plain make you feel toxic. You can have headache syndromes and other stuff if you're trapped at the aldehyde level.
And so what then we need is an aldehyde enzyme step to get rid of it at the end. So this is why I call the third pathway the long winding pathway, because we need methyl donors, then we need MAO support, which is very similar to DAO support. So you look looking at things like vitamin B6 and magnesium and vitamin C and stuff like that. And then the aldehyde support is going to include all of the above plus vitamin B1, thiamine, which is very important in reducing things. The other thing that helps at the end there with the aldehyde getting out of the body is vitamin B3.
And the form that is often used is niacinamide or nicotinamide, niacinamide. And nowadays we have these high speed supplements that help nad form in the body nad is actual cofactor for that step so got a whole bunch of b vitamins in there but if you think of three ways out for this nasty histamine molecule take care of the easy ones first the acetylation with b5 and the dao and then work on the long winding one because it's got all of those other intermediates in there and i've done a whole video on the youtube channel just on those pathways to take a look at so number one is lower the histamine in your diet number two is attend to all three elimination pathways. And then number three is more understanding why histamine can be such a problem. So there's a lot of other reasons for histamine to give us health problems other than we might just be a little allergic or a lot allergic to pollen or something. That's certainly one reason, right?
But there's a lot of upstream triggers to the cells that release histamine that can be additional to the allergic phenomenon such as pollen or other allergies we might have. have. And so those things then can be mass cell activation syndrome, which means that the cells that release histamine and other inflammatory chemicals are too sensitive and they release the chemicals prematurely and they shouldn't be doing it. So mass cell problems can do it.
Chronic infections can trigger these things, very common. Poor digestion and inappropriate microbiome in your gut can trigger these things. as well.
Toxicities can trigger these things and any number of other things. So it is good and it is possible to help reduce the histamine in your body. But if it's a real big problem beyond just a simple allergic phenomenon, by that I don't mean to minimize people have allergies. I have allergies.
I don't like them. And so I know what they feel like. But if you have a chronic illness that you may not know about or you do know about, and it has characteristics of chronic infections or toxicities or gut problems, microbiome problems. biofilms, mast cell activation issues. Those have to, you know, you need to know that part one and two, lower the histamine in your diet, improve the elimination of histamine can really help.
But if you still are having problems, we got to tackle big number three, which is what else is triggering histamine in my system. And that's really where working with somebody who can help you with the chronic illness piece can be very, very useful. Now below, I'm going to list a link to a few supplements. that my patients have found useful. It's not an affiliate.
I have no connection financially to these people other than they make really good nutritional supplement products. And it's Seeking Health if you're looking for it, but the link will be down below. And I list the three primary histamine removal or histamine supportive things that we use from them.
They also do make a DAO and some other supplements around histamine as well. But again, no financial connection, just love their quality and the patients really respond well. If you liked this video, take a look at my other videos.
look around here. There's going to be links to other things. We've got a big histamine playlist over on the main channel at YouTube. Got other playlists that are cool. Let us offer you some other things to listen to and I'll see you all on the next video.