Making Sense of Getting Sick Off of Perfectly Healthy Food

Thanks Meagan! It’s been frustrating. With the number of people who have these things, it seems like the American medical community would be paying more attention! But I have to find research coming out of Australia, Switzerland and the UK to get anywhere. *grumble, grumble* 🙂

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A DOCTOR OR A MEDICAL PRACTITIONER OF ANY KIND. I’ll tell you my thoughts to help you get started on your own research, but this is not in any way shape or form medical advice. Don’t sue me. 😉

First off, my understanding is that Zantac is for ulcers and heartburn, neither of which is cramping. My gut aches are caused by cramping. Muscle relaxants will relieve them. (Although taking muscle relaxants regularly is not something I am interested in doing!) While I do occasionally get heartburn, that’s a completely different feeling in a different place (it feels like burning pain over my heart, or like a full bubble that I’m afraid will burst if I take too big a breath). Cramping…feels like that time of the month by higher up. 🙂 It feels like a pinching squeeze or stabbing pain. I can get those in my stomach (sometimes) or right around my belly button (intestines–more common and more intense when they happen, to me anyway). So, that would explain (IM Non-Medical O) why Zantac isn’t helping.

Since little of the research comes from the Americas, tomatillos are not something I’ve found out much about. They are a nightshade, which some people have issues with (particularly if stiff joints are an issue), but if you have a nightshade sensitivity you’d also notice it with tomatoes, eggplant and/or bell peppers.

There are a lot of high histamine foods on your list–bananas (the more ripe the worse they are, and I’ve noticed that I handle them a lot better in baked goods than out, despite that not making any medical sense), pineapple and egg whites (particularly uncooked) are all either histamine heavy or histamine releasers. (Yeast is also a histamine problem, so the baked goods could be about the eggs or they could be about the yeast.)

I will add that eggs are a common food problem all on their own, although the specificity of egg WHITES is more common in histamine problems as opposed to egg problems.

Broccoli is not typically considered a problem for HIT, but it is a FODMAP which can exacerbate problems that already exist. Histamine levels also increase on everything the further they are from farm to table, so broccoli that’s been in the fridge for awhile has had a chance to develop histamines. Another thing you could look at is how you’re cooking it. For example, citrus causes a histamine release in the body, and butter develops histamine quickly if kept on the counter. So while raw broccoli you got at the farmer’s market that morning shouldn’t be a problem for HITers, broccoli that’s been in the fridge for awhile, cooked in butter that’s been sitting on the counter with a bit of garlic (for all it’s “miracle cure” advertising garlic is quite hard on a sensitive system), and then spritzed with lemon juice goes from “nothing wrong” to “histamine load” pretty quickly.

That’s one of the big problems with sussing out an intolerance is that they get complicated quickly based on many different factors. 🙂

Fructose malabsorption is another really common intolerance you might look at. Bananas (the more ripe, the worse) and broccoli can cause problems with that, but not eggs (although, again, eggs can be their own problem).

The longer a sensitivity goes without giving the gut a break, the more sensitive the person will be, so that would explain adding more foods as time passes. There is probably something else that you regularly eat that is keeping you right at your tolerance threshold and then these foods that you consume more rarely overflow the bucket. For example, I never realized tomatoes were a problem for me. But I ate them ALL THE TIME. Intolerances work like a bucket, and everybody’s bucket is a different size. You can eat a certain amount of the thing you’re sensitive too and be fine, but as soon as the bucket overflows…problem! So I was regularly filling my bucket with tomatoes, and then when I added a banana or piece of chocolate on top (things I ate far more rarely than tomatoes) I overflowed the bucket. I solely blamed the bananas/chocolate/other item when the problem was the combination. So think about the foods you eat most consistently, and there’s a good chance one of them is a major factor in your problem without you knowing it.

The most common way to test for an intolerance is an elimination diet in which you select a particular intolerance diet to try for a month and see if your symptoms improve. If you don’t want to wait for 3-4 weeks for an answer, you can take a night to nosh on a certain chemical and see if you are miserable and hugging a toilet the next day (just be careful not to do two at once; I did that and convinced myself I had fructose malabsorption, which I didn’t realize I’d inadvertently histamine bombed myself at the same time). With a histamine intolerance, people usually notice that they can’t drink red wine. So if you consumed reasonable quantities of red wine and brie (or other ripened cheese) with some nuts and a piece of chocolate one night and that made you horribly ill, it’s possible HIT is your problem, or part of it anyway. If you can eat that and be fine, then histamine is definitely not your problem. (Obviously drinking a bottle of Merlot by yourself and then getting sick may not be caused by histamines. 😉 And remember, too, that EVERYONE can histamine bomb themselves if they go overboard. We all have our thresholds for what our body can handle for every chemical we ingest. An intolerance is when you can’t handle a perfectly normal amount of something, not when you have a temporary problem because you went crazy eating abnormal amounts of something.)

For people with sensitivities, staying away from sugar and wheat is also very helpful in healing the system so that you have a little more flexibility within your intolerance. People with already irritated systems also might want to consider avoiding dairy and soy, as they can become problems for people with an already irritated system. One of the frustrating (and confusing) problems with an intolerance is that while there is usually a base problem, once the gut is damaged other things can temporarily become an issue, making it a challenge to figure out what the base problem actually is. Like, I am pretty sure at this point that HIT is my problem, but it’s been going on for so long now that I can’t handle an abundance of lactose. I wouldn’t call myself lactose intolerant, and it’s possible that once I heal my system I can go back to eating normal amounts of dairy. But while I’m still trying to heal up from years of living with too much excess histamine in my system, my body can’t handle lactose in anything other than very small quantities.

Last note, it sounds like you know which foods are causing the problem, which is good. One thing I did, however, discover along my journey is that my stomach is not where I think it is. Stomachs are right under the base of our rib cages, a little to the left of center. Immediate problems with a particular food will be felt there. Food enters the small intestine 2-4 hours later, and the problem (usually cramping) will move lower. Food spends a day or two in the intestines. So it’s good to think about where the pain is and what you had, maybe not at the last meal, but two meals ago or even yesterday and the day before when trying to determine which food is causing the problem.

Good luck! I’ll be talking more about HIT in particular next week, so if next week’s post sounds familiar to you (or not) that might help you decide if histamine is your issue or not.