The Complete Guide to Managing Your Histamines
If you've ever had an allergic reaction or seen one, you know firsthand how scary, annoying, and inconvenient they can be.
But have you ever stopped to ask yourself how one food or Allergan can be life-threatening to one person and completely harmless to another? Have you ever wondered what's behind those headaches, congestion, rashes, or other symptoms? At Ullo, we certainly think about that a lot in the context of wine, but it's helpful to understand the source, which is histamines.
Watch any TV channel for a couple of hours these days, and you're bound to see at least one commercial for anti-histamines. When your body is struggling to deal with a high histamine level of exposure, modern medicine has a cure for that. However, we believe a better solution is to familiarize yourself what histamines, where they come from, and how they affect your body to equip yourself with the knowledge to help avoid histamines in the first place, so you don't need to pop a pill.
Histamines and biogenic amines are naturally occurring compounds found in our environment, our diets, and our lifestyle. In their basic form, they aren't necessarily a bad thing. However, Histamines can also be produced by our bodies. You see, when your body encounters an allergen, the immune system will release histamines to help turn on your body's defense system against allergens. Unfortunately, our bodies get it wrong or perceive the threat as more significant than what it is. The release of histamines can cause the adverse effects of headaches, hives, difficulty breathing, and inflammation.
So, on the one hand, this means that histamines are doing their job; on the other hand, it means that when our bodies are artificially overloaded on allergens or histamines, we must suffer the unfortunate side effects.
Another critical aspect to understand is your histamine tolerance or intolerance. Unfortunately, allergies and issues with histamines are not a light switch that gets turned on or off. Instead, we have to look at it through the lens of quantity and tolerance.
Quantity is precisely what we think it would be; how many allergens are you exposed to, and how much histamines are circulating throughout your body. Therefore, eliminating exposure to allergens or other factors that cause your body to release histamines will ultimately reduce the amount of circulating histamines in your body and reduce their side effects.
Tolerance is harder to pin down because we all have different tolerances to histamines in terms of quantity and onset. For example, you may know some people who enjoy red wine all the time and never seem to suffer from any side effects, while you or someone else you know will break out into hives from one glass of red wine. You might think the first person has better luck, but in reality, it could be that their body is tolerant of higher levels of histamines. Essentially some people have a high capacity for histamines while others don't. Small things, such as a small glass of wine with histamines, can tip the scales into causing a histamine side-effect for those with low tolerances.
As mentioned earlier, histamines levels can fluctuate based on your diet, environment, and lifestyle, making it difficult to pin down ways to reduce them to enjoy wine without having to worry about them. However, our team believes several different steps can be taken to mitigate the causes and effects of histamines, but we'll save those for another blog post to be sure to subscribe so you can get all the knowledge!
