April 2020 -

Should you take supplements?

Often, when you go see a doctor for a specific health complaint, you walk away with a medication prescription, a pill to take to make you feel better.

And as a society, we’re quite enamoured with pills and supplements.

So, when it comes to managing your Endometriosis symptoms naturally, should you take supplements?

Well, it depends.

Supplements can play an important, temporary, role in improving your health and reducing your Endometriosis symptoms, but the operative word there is ‘temporary’.

My philosophy is that food should be your main strategy. Changing what you eat and drink is a sustainable strategy, one that you can stick to for the long haul.

Sometimes though, you need a bit of a ‘jump start’.

Most of my clients have nutrient deficiencies, because their digestive system doesn’t function optimally, and they are not absorbing nutrients as well as they should.

And because of the Endometriosis, the need for certain nutrients is higher than in healthy people.

Or their diets are low in certain nutrients, or at least too low for their extra needs.

In these cases, addressing nutrient deficiencies through food alone would mean they’d have to eat enormous amounts of certain foods and it would take a long time to tackle the deficiencies. Supplements can be a good way to boost the effects of the changes in diet.

Supplements contain high concentrations of certain nutrients, for example iron or vitamin B and by taking them regularly you give your body that extra boost, that jump start that will help you to see results much faster.

But supplements are not harmless. For many vitamins the body can build up an excess and this then produces unwanted side-effects and symptoms.

Please don’t rush out to the chemist or supermarket to buy a range of supplements!

Firstly, because not everyone needs the same supplements: your unique health situation will be underpinned by a unique set of nutrient deficiencies.

And secondly, because the supplements you buy in the supermarket or at the chemist’s are not therapeutic supplements. They are produced for the masses, will contain standard amounts of the nutrients that are so low that it is difficult to ‘overdose’ and often have unwanted fillers and additives.

It is important to get trustworthy advice on which supplements will be most beneficial for you based on your unique set of symptoms, and then to take supplements that are ‘Practitioner Only’ to guarantee you get a therapeutic dose of a high-quality nutrient.

If you are considering if supplements are useful for you, please see a qualified Nutritionist or Naturopath. I’d be happy to have an obligation-free chat with you to help you make your decision. You can book a free Exploratory Chat online.

What does a low-histamine diet look like?

Before we look at what you can and cannot eat in a low-histamine diet, let’s see how food and histamine are connected.

There are 4 types of interactions between food and histamine.

Foods that contain high levels of histamine: eating these is just adding lots of histamine to your system, directly triggering your immune response.

We’re talking about alcohol; pickled or canned food; matured cheeses; smoked, processed meat products (sausages, ham etc); shellfish; beans, pulses and peanuts; walnuts and cashews; vinegar; tomatoes; avocados; eggplant; spinach; most citrus fruit; anything that contains cocoa; ready meals; salty snacks; lollies; anything that contains colourings and/or preservatives.

There are some foods on this list you wouldn’t eat on an anti-inflammatory diet either, but also some healthy fruit and vegetables.

Foods that make it easier for histamine-containing foods to release that histamine: the enablers.

All the foods on the previous list also make it easier for other foods to release their histamine. So combining a tomato with an avocado, some spinach and a sausage is more than a quadruple whammy!

And egg white is another food that enables the release of histamine.

Foods that prevent histamine from being removed from your body: so even if you don’t add any histamine to your body, these foods will keep whatever amount is in your system flowing around your body.

These are mostly drinks: alcohol; black tea; energy drinks; green tea; mate tea, and yeast (so beer is double trouble).

And finally, the foods you can eat on a low-histamine diet: foods that contain little or no histamine. The good ones!

Fortunately, there is still a reasonable range of foods to choose from: fresh meat, chicken and fish; egg yolk; most fresh fruits; most vegetables and herbs; gluten-free wholegrains; coconut, rice, almond and macadamia milk; vegetable cooking oil; most herbal teas; most non-citrus whole-fruit fruit juices.

To find out if you are histamine-intolerant, you eat from this list only for one week.

If you see an improvement in your symptoms, you know you have an intolerance to histamine and may need to continue with the low-histamine diet.
If you don’t notice any change, you could add another week to make sure, or just stick to an anti-inflammatory diet.

If you do notice a difference, and think histamine might be a problem for you, please let me know. We want to make sure that we adjust your diet, so you still get all the nutrients you need, by finding good alternatives to the histamine foods.

The symptoms of histamine intolerance

Histamine intolerance is often overlooked as a potential contributor to Endometriosis symptoms. And there is an obvious reason for it.

These are the symptoms of histamine intolerance:

Abdominal pain
Abnormal menstrual cycle
Anxiety
Arrhythmia (irregular heart beat)
Brain fog
Cramping
Depression
Difficulty breathing
Fatigue
Flushing
Gluten sensitivity
Headaches
Heart palpitations
High blood pressure
Hives
Insomnia
Irritability
Joint pain.
Migraines
Nasal congestion
Nausea
Racing heart
Rashes
Reflux/heartburn
Runny nose
Sneezing
Tissue swelling
Vertigo/dizziness
Vomiting

How many of the symptoms from histamine intolerance do you have?

Now, it would be great if we could quickly test you for histamine intolerance, like we can test for food allergies. But there isn’t a reliable lab test, unfortunately.

If, at this point, you thought you’d just go to the chemist and buy some anti-histamines and be done with it, I’ll have to disappoint you.

Anti-histamine medication suppresses symptoms AND adds to your overall inflammation by irritating your gut.

If you are sensitive to histamine, we need to minimise the amount that ends up in your system to begin with, so all the good work you’ve been doing with your anti-inflammatory diet is not going to waste.

And one of the great things about having an histamine intolerance is that if you remove histamine foods from your diet, you’ll feel better in just one week.

I think that might make the diet worth it, don’t you?

That’s why the “12 Weeks to Eat Your Way to Less Pain” program includes 1 anti-histamine week. Most women will get to the end of that week, and happily never worry about histamine again. Some women finally discover the main culprit behind many of their symptoms.

If you have some of the more unusual symptoms in the list of histamine intolerance symptoms and you would like to explore if histamine might be the culprit, please get in touch. It is important to do this diet under close supervision, because it is a very restrictive diet and we need to make sure you still get all the key nutrients. You can book an obligation-free Exploratory Chat right here.

Could you be histamine-intolerant?

Following an anti-inflammatory diet is the first crucial step to reducing your chronic inflammation and improving your Endometriosis symptoms. But if you are histamine-intolerant you may be blaming your Endo unfairly!

The inflammation is your immune system’s somewhat over-dramatic response to foods that are not really requiring the response. But we know, your immune system is more sensitive then that of women without Endo.

One of the ways your immune system is triggered is through histamine.

For some of you, the main cause of most of your symptoms might be that you are histamine-intolerant.

So what is histamine?

It is released by cells when they are triggered by an injury, an allergic reaction or by inflammatory reactions.

The best-known example is hay fever: when the pollen come in contact with the mucous membranes in your nose, they trigger an immune response and the cells in your nose release histamine. The role of histamine is to get rid of these invaders. And in the case of hay-fever, the histamine causes you to sneeze and have a runny nose.

Histamine intolerance in Endometriosis means your body doesn’t tolerate histamine and it overreacts to the presence of histamine.

There are two possible reasons for this:

You could have chronically raised histamine levels. Your body’s normal response to raised levels of any compound is to try to reduce it back to normal levels. But after a while the body becomes irritated and an intolerance is created. Histamine levels can be raised because of food allergies, genetics, histamine-rich foods, allergies (non-food), bacterial overgrowth or imbalance, leaky gut, or fermented alcohol (beer, wine, spirits).

Your body is not able to remove histamine properly. So histamine keeps circulating in your body, creating a constant immune response. This may be because of diamine oxidase (an enzyme that removes excess histamine) deficiency.

If you think you might have an histamine intolerance, sign up for my “12 Weeks to Eat Your Way to Less Pain” and discover if the anti-histamine diet might be the answer for you.