# food intolerance causes all kinds of weird stuff!



## Maria (Apr 24, 2003)

A year and a half ago I was in pretty bad shape. Acid reflux/ constipation/ esophageal spasms/ constant abdominal bloating along with constant powerful burps- such that they interupted sleep / eczema and then my joints started hurting a lot and I was diagnosed with early osteoarthritis and told I'd better get used to it, that this was who I was from there on out. 

Since my family has a history of sensitive stomachs, I dismissed all the GI stuff as something I could do nothing about. I'd seen a doctor, and she had no suggestions for me besides losing weight and taking drugs. The arthritis I sighed about and went on. But the eczema was in my eyelids and was starting to get really painful and oozing. There HAD to be something I could do about that!

So, after much internet searching, I found a suggestion that a wheat free diet could help with that sort of thing. What the heck. Maybe it would help.

After a week of no wheat products (boy was that hard!) I suddenly noticed that my GI symptoms had subsided. For the first time in a very long time, my tummy was QUIET. Wow!

So I read up on gluten free diet and decided that must be my problem. I learned how to keep a completely gluten free kitchen and waited for the eczema in my eyelids to go away. A month passed, but no results. After a particularly shameful chocoholic attack, I noticed that the eyelid problem was worse than ever. The light bulb went on, finally. What if it was (oh help!) chocolate?

It was. After a week of no chocolate, my eyelids healed and haven't flared up since. OK, so ... it's gluten _and _chocolate. After another month, my joints stopped hurting! THAT was unexpected, and quite welcome! So much for you, Dr. Rheumatologist! :nana: Telling me there was no hope. :flame:

Despite my care in the kitchen and almost never eating out, I kept getting "glutened" as it's called. I'd be in pain for days after eating the wrong thing. I could only assume that tiny, tiny microquantities of gluten were somehow getting into the ingredients I was using. (This is a common theory with people on this diet.) It was terribly, terribly frustrating. I'd make a pretty good loaf of gluten free bread (NOT easy) and be hurting for days. The same with gluten free pizza. And even the absolutely delicious gluten free carrot cake I developed. 

Finally a year later, after getting hit bad by an impossible meal (tuna salad with lots of boiled eggs in it) I started looking for another answer.

After googling "tuna intolerance" I came upon a website about histamine intolerance. After an unbelieving look at the long, long list of foods that histamine intolerant people can't eat, I dismissed it. That couldn't be me. That was just crazy! No one could live like that!

But it kept nagging me. Later that week I had a single boiled egg for breakfast with nothing but water. I reacted. :help: A glass of orange juice a day later. I reacted. :sob: Oh, no... it probably was histamine intolerance. As a final test I made some biscuits with rye flour (rye has no histamines, but some gluten) and I was OK. If I'd been gluten intolerant, I'd have been in agony for a few days.

So, histamine intolerance it is.

Now, there isn't a comprehensive, cool, respected website for histamine intolerance. There are a bunch of small ones, mostly in Europe, and the foods listed don't always agree. Of course there are the main categories of anything fermented or yeast raised and tomatoes and wheat and fish and eggs and citrus... but that's the tip of the iceberg.

I went to all the sites I could find and made a master list of ALL the foods listed and spent a couple of weeks avoiding them all. I felt fine. Then one by one every week or so, I try something new on the list and am slowly developing my own personal list of foods I can't eat.

Most of them, I can't. But some on that list I can. And some of them are OK in limited quantities.

And it's not as bad as I thought it would be. Sure, there are times when I have episodes of Poor Me... can't eat what I want to eat.... but I get over it. 

Knowing what to avoid and being successful at it is priceless. It's a hundred times better than hurting all the time and not knowing why and doctors just trying to put a drug bandaid on the problem. (Yes, I did see a digestive specialist several times, but she was rather unhelpful.) Histamine intolerance isn't something that's taught in the med schools in the US, I guess.

Anyway, I'm not really expecting anyone else here to have this particular malady, but I wouldn't mind hearing about other food intolerances that you folks have.

And I've got some dandy gluten free recipes to share, if anyone has simple gluten intolerance.  I got pretty good at gluten free cooking during my year of trying to fit that model.


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## bajiay (Apr 8, 2008)

I've never heard of histamine intolerance related to food! I am in pre-med.
So, can you share the list you made? I'm very interested! Daughter has alot of histamine reactions and we don't know why. I would like to try this!


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## Maria (Apr 24, 2003)

Sure! This is compiled from half a dozen websites I found. Some of them test out OK (I'm so glad I can still eat chicken & bacon & brats!) but most of them aren't.

Alcohol
Anise
Apricot
Artificial colors
Artificial flavors
Avocado
Bacon
Baking mix
Bananas
Beans, red
Beans, soy
Beer
Blue Cheese 
Bratwurst
Buttermilk
Cake decorations
Candies, commercial
Cashews
Champagne 
Cheese
Cherry
Chicken
Chickpeas
Chocolate
Cider
Cinnamon
Citrus
Cloves
Cocoa
Coffee
Confectionary
Cranberry
Currant
Curry
Date
Drinks, carbonated
egg white
Eggplant
Fish
Fish, canned 
Flour, bleached
Gelatin, flavored
Gherkin pickles
Grapefruits
Ham
Icings, ready made
Ketchup
Kiwi
Loganberry
Mango
Margarine
Meals, prepackaged
Meats, leftover
Meats, processed
Milk, flavored
Mincemeat
Miso
Mushrooms
Mustard
Nectarine
Nutmeg
nuts
Olives
Orange
Papayas
Paprika
Parmesan Cheese 
Pea
Peach
Peanuts
Pears
Pineapple
Pizza
Plums
Preservatives
Prunes
Prunes, red
Pumpkin
Raisins
Raspberries
Red Wine 
Relish
Salads, commercially prepared
Salami
Sauerkraut
Sausage 
shellfish
Soy sauce
Spinach
Strawberries
Sunflower seeds
Syrups, flavored
Tangerines
Tea, all
Tea, black
Tofu 
Tomato Ketchup 
Tomatoes
Vegetables, canned
Vinegar, balsamic
Vinegar, red wine
Walnuts
Wheat
Wine
Yeast
Yogurt


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## bajiay (Apr 8, 2008)

Wow. That is alot of stuff. Alot that she eats. This is going to be fun...


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## Maria (Apr 24, 2003)

Isn't it a crazy list? After I put it all together, I just sort of made a plan to try to avoid the worst offenders (fermented stuff) and keep the other things down to one item per meal to keep the total histamine load down. 

After a while I just got lazy, though. I mostly eat meat and potatoes with corn or green beans for most meals. I have a waffle recipe I love made out of oat, rice & rye flour that I use for breakfast every day. There are cereals that are OK, but I just don't like them much. 

And vanilla ice cream. That's about the only dessert left to me. That, and butterscotch pudding.

It's enough. For a while I was lactose intolerant, but I got that back after a few months of going gluten free. 

As a side note- I also noticed that a few months after going gluten free, my hair was growing in curlier. I've always had long wavy blondish hair.... but now everything new growing in is super, super curly! It's weird getting used to a new texture. I figure in another 5 years or so (doesn't the average hair live 7 years?) it'll be completely the new texture and I'll have to cut it short or something. I don't know what to do with kinky hair. As it is, when I go out in the wind now, the sort kinky hairs foof up into a halo around my head while the older long hairs just kind of hang there. 

Diet can affect everything!

Oh, and after I went histamine free..... my ears stopped producing ear wax. That's weird. For 40+ years I've had an absolutely unbreakable custom, when I get out of the shower, I clean my ear canals with a Q tip. I know that's frowned upon nowadays, but it's what I do.

Now I still do it, but since early last fall, the Q tip always comes out completely clean.

Weird, huh?


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## mrs whodunit (Feb 3, 2012)

Fascinating. 

Oldest dd and I get hives everyday unless we take Allerclear.... somebody suggested histamine intolerance to me.

Hadn't realized the foods to avoid was such a long list. We haven't tried the 'diet' yet.


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## WJMartin (Nov 2, 2011)

My sister and her daughter have problems with soy. No one else in our large family has any food problems but we are all allergic to poison ivy, highly allergic. When sis comes to visit I forget how many things have soy in them until she keeps saying, can't have that, can't have this, soy is used alot in food processing.


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## bajiay (Apr 8, 2008)

My daughter gets hives alot. She has alot of other health issues as well. This will be interesting to try to see what happens. It will have to wait until after we move though! I can only handle one stressor at a time!


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## mountainwmn (Sep 11, 2009)

Hmm, they told me I have celiac, but the diet hasn't totally fixed my problems. Is this something they can test for, or do you have to just not eat any of it and try to figure it out yourself?


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## cjean (May 1, 2007)

mountainwmn, I have celiac, and here's a list of things other than gluten that I cannot tolerate:

rice
eggs
poultry
dairy (actually allergic to casein, and lactose intolerant)
soy
legumes
teff
amaranth
bananas
licorice (legume family)
guar gum (legume family)
and....more that I can't remember, since I cut them out so long ago

Celiac can do so much damage to the intestines that it causes many other food intolerances. It is so frustrating! For a long time I could not eat any cane sugar or processed sugar. Fructose was okay. The sugar causes the intestines to "clamp down", creating constipation and pain. Something to consider....


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## Maria (Apr 24, 2003)

Sugar is one of the things I have no problems tolerating- which is a relief. I'd be an unhappy camper if I couldn't have sugar too.

I was tested for the antibodies that go along with celiac and didn't have those. And I use rye flour in my daily waffle and am OK, so I really am not gluten intolerant like I thought I was.

There are several places online that offer a histamine intolerance test- just google "histamine intolerance test". I haven't done one because the change in diet keeps me feeling OK. Also, because I didn't know about it until just now! 

I've been gradually feeling more and more like I've been ingesting histamine the past couple of weeks. It might just be the maple syrup I bought a few weeks ago here on HT, that I've been using daily.  I sure hope not. That stuff is GOOD!

But that's how it goes sometimes. Something new that seems OK at first slowly builds to a real intolerance reaction. I'm getting messages of impending doom from both my GI tract and my skin. It may be back to Log Cabin syrup for me. _*sigh*_ That stuff has never given me any problem. You'd think real maple syrup would be better for me, but perhaps not.


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## Cliff (Jun 30, 2007)

I admire you for sticking with it and figuring out what is wrong with you and how to control it. It's such a pain, especially when so many foods are involved, that lots of people just throw up their hands and live in misery taking pills.

For me I know that it's just gluten, thank goodness, which as I said in the other thread I had to figure out on my own also. I was getting severe RA symptoms, every single joint in my body was inflamed hurting and stiff. Now I'm fine, no symptoms at all. Thankfully I seem to have figured it out before too much damage was done. I made sure any doc that would listen to me knew about it lol (I'm a nurse.) Fig it might help someone else sometime if they had that in the back of their minds.

When I looked at all the symptoms it can cause, esp. in kids, I had the warning signs my whole life. Terrible headaches, terrible constipation, really skinny etc. I never had the classic bloating and diarrhea.


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## Maria (Apr 24, 2003)

Oh, it was seriously frustrating when I was certain that the only thing wrong with me was gluten intolerance and that I was just getting contaminated by 2 or 3 molecules of gluten over and over again. I wouldn't even kiss my husband after he'd eaten bread or drunk a beer until after he'd rinsed his mouth out.

And still I'd get zapped! It was a horrible time. Now the list is much, much longer, but it's about macro quantities not microscopic ones. If I want to put a half teaspoon dribble of chocolate syrup on my ice cream- well, I can usually get away with that. My waffle recipe uses a little bit of buttermilk & egg- and that's OK, too. But if I eat a whole egg, I start having symptoms. 

Histamine intolerance is like a container that fills up and when it overflows, then you start having trouble. My container is pretty darn small. If I keep my food sources down really, really low, then other histamine causes aren't so likely to fill up that container.

Oh, did I mention the other causes? Stress is one. And allergies that cause your body to produce histamines in response. Even exercise can cause histamine release! So, I don't try to do aerobic exercise any more and try to stay mellow.  I get plenty of low level exercise working on our farm, but no more running for me! I can only go a minute or so before the histamine release starts up an asthmatic wheeze. And I don't have asthma! Well, I guess I do now, when I exercise. But I've never had asthma before. Ever.

So anyway, it's a kind of balancing act. I can't get away from histamine all together, because it's an integral part of the body's chemistry. But I can try to keep the levels down to what my body can break down on its own. And that seems to be working fine.

Most of the trouble started in my 40s, but some of the things have been life long. I've never been able to tolerate coffee, for instance. One sip of coffee and my guts will soon be feeling like they are being twisted into balloon animals. Not fun. I've only tasted coffee about 3 times in my life. It sure smells good, but as far as I'm concerned it's _poison_.


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## Elsbet (Apr 2, 2009)

Very interesting. I'm going to have to look into this more, because it sounds like it could help.
I have celiac disease, and have been GF for 5 or 6 years now. The diet helped quite a lot, but I am also lactose intolerant- I can handle small amounts of cheese, and cream in my tea doesn't bother me. But a glass of milk or a bowl of chowder- ergh. When I first went GF I was reactive to potatoes and rice, too. I thought I had outgrown that, but now I'm noticing the same old tummy tied in knots thing after eating too much (or any) of a good thing. (I LOVE potatoes and rice!) I can't eat bananas very often- major migraine trigger. I've got a lot of foods I avoid for that reason.
I'm really going to have to look into this.


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## Maria (Apr 24, 2003)

I need to correct what I said above. I was still lactose intolerant while I was gluten free (very much hoping that would reverse) but it wasn't until I went histamine free that I got the lactose digestability back again. 

Now I've got a couple of boxes of Lactaid left over. As well as a whole box of home gluten tests, now that I think about it! That was part of what tipped the scale for me. Once I got that test kit in, whenever I'd get hurt by a meal I'd test the left overs. And out of the four or five tests I did, NONE of them had measurable gluten. I did another test on crackers, just to see if the tests were working right (they were) - and then started looking for other answers. Either I was insanely hypersensitive, beyond the ability of the test to detect (yes, I clung to that belief for a short while) or it just wasn't gluten that was getting me.

GlutenTox was the test kit I used.


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## LariatLady (Feb 1, 2009)

From the time I was six, I thought I had asthma. The kitchen cabinet at home looked like a pharmacy. Had allergy shots for years and then inhalant-steroids. Fast forward to my mid-forties and I go to a Naturopathic Doctor. He tells me I need to eat a raw vegan diet if I want off the steroid and puffer.

As long as I eat raw fruits and veggies, I am fine. No Advair (which, by the way, caused cataracts), no more inhaler, no allergy shots, no pharmaceuticals! So, this tells me that my asthma symptoms were actually food intolerance. I cannot have dairy, wheat or flour products, peanuts, soy, or any processed foods or meats. 

Yes, Maria, food intolerance DOES cause all kinds of weird stuff! But the key is doing exactly what you did - RESEARCH!! I can't tell you how many times the doctors only answer was STEROIDS!!! 







​ I just avoid doctors now and either self-diagnose or see my Naturopath. [Sorry bajiay.] Since I took my health back into my own hands, I've never been healthier and I'm totally drug-free! :bouncy:


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## LariatLady (Feb 1, 2009)

Maria said:


> I can only go a minute or so before the histamine release starts up an asthmatic wheeze. And I don't have asthma! Well, I guess I do now, when I exercise. But I've never had asthma before. Ever.


This is so interesting. I'm sitting here wondering if all those years of thinking I was asthmatic - and being drugged to death with pharmaceuticals - my symptoms were merely a reaction to food intolerance! As long as I avoid the offending foods, I experience no asthma-like symptoms. I can breathe (and run) without any issues! Interesting.


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## Maria (Apr 24, 2003)

I've always been leery of doctors, so I went the route of trying every alternative cure I could find for my digestive troubles before going to an MD. Even then I had a pretty firm idea in my head what was wrong and went straight to a digestive health clinic rather than go see a general practioner and get referred to a specialist. (It turned out I was wrong... but .... well, hey... I still picked the right specialist! )

I took a two page summary of the troubles I'd been having and what I thought caused it all and had a list of questions written down to ask. And even though I was seeing a specialist, she knew less than I did about current research in the field and told me I was wrong about a particular fact. I looked up the pub med article later and sent her a copy, and she thanked me for it when she sent me test results , but made no apology for the fact that she was not keeping up with current data in her own field of "expertise".

I always come away from doctors feeling like both our times have been wasted. I understand now that this is because I have a very rare problem with all kinds of weird ramifications.

Speaking of weird... I've had plantar fasciitis since 2003. I refused the doctor's advice back then and came up with my own ways of coping with it. It comes, it goes. I don't worry much about it... but I'm beginning to see a correlation with my state of inflammation. I hadn't experienced a flare up in months and just this week I've started noticing that old intense sole of foot pain again. Right when I'm having a possible maple syrup reaction.

Plantar fasciitis is thought to be caused by micro tears in the fascia of the bottoms of the feet that never really heal right and some people go for years without getting better. Admittedly, this is an off and on again thing with me-- but there just might be a connection. Systemic inflammation causing that old injury to flare up, I mean.

Something else to think about.


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## mountainwmn (Sep 11, 2009)

This has been very interesting. When I started to get sick this time I had been eating healthy for a week or so. Lots of salad, rice, oranges, fresh veggies. And I remembered I was eating the same way right before my first bout of whatever is supposed to be wrong with me 12 years ago. I know I'm lactose intolerant, but I never had the bathroom issues that so many others complain of. Just pain. 
I did already know that I can't have tomatos (hives) and that red wine, fresh cherries, plums, apples, and once in a while something odd like a chocolate truffle will cause my lips, gums and throat to swell and itch.
Oh, and I never knew you could test for gluten yourself, thats incredible!


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## Maria (Apr 24, 2003)

Yeah, I sent off for that home food test, and was floored when I found that the foods I was reacting to had no measurable gluten. It's a fairly easy test to do, though, so I knew I'd done it right.

Eating healthy takes on a whole new meaning when you have food intolerances. Any dietician would probably go into coniption fits if they knew what I was eating nowadays. I can't even take multivitamins anymore. 

I _have _ to take mineral supplements or I get incapacitating muscle pains and cramps. This started after I went gluten free and so I looked up the nutritional data of wheat vs. the sort of carbs I've been eating now-- and there's less than half of the important minerals you need a lot of like potassium, magnesium and calcium. So I've been supplementing heavily with those, but if I try to throw in a multivitamin or fish oil, it's bad news.

I even got some of those minerals in powdered form to add to the gluten free bread products I was making, hoping that would put the taste right... but no luck with that. The calcium and the magnesium didn't have much flavor and the potassium just tasted vaguely salty. The only thing that ever made the bread turn out OK was the addition of gluten free beer. The beer itself was nasty and not worth drinking, but it did make the bread taste more or less "right". Not that I can eat it now. The yeast turns out to be 100 times worse than the wheat was. I can eat wheat in small quantities, but nothing yeast raised.


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## fransean (Dec 21, 2002)

I have been following this thread with great interest and thinking .........could this be me? Well, it might fit. I have started to do some research online for information related to histamine intolerance. 
I started to take some antihistamine OTC meds a few days ago and although sleepy my eczema started to clear up the localized swelling in ears and legs were gone and digestive system was working "differently". 
Now I am after alternatives to the antihistamines so that I can stop taking them - like the benefits don't like the side effects.
I did not take the OTC meds for about a day and a half and the itching is coming back the swelling in my ear is back and my legs are swollen and were painful last night.

Thank you for leading me to a possible answer to a variety of health issues that have plagued me for years.


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