6 Ways to Lower Histamine Levels for Allergy Relief

Video Transcript:

Histamine levels elevated? Today, I want to share with you six different ways to lower histamine levels. If you’re not sure if you have histamine or are dealing with a histamine reaction, let me share with you some symptoms to be aware of: allergies; skin reactions, or skin reactivity; hives; runny nose; fluid in your ears; scratchy throat; and even digestive imbalances or digestive disturbances can be signs of histamines.

Histamines, in general, are a way for the body to… it’s a body process related to inflammatory cells, and it’s part of the inflammatory process, but it’s also in response to either a foreign invader or a residual effect of your immune system. Now, we have scenarios like different viruses and even food-related histamine reactions that can elevate your histamine levels, so I want to share with you these six ways to lower histamine naturally.

1. Eat a Low-Histamine Diet

First and foremost, you want to take part in a low-histamine diet. Histamines are going to be found in a lot of the aged, packaged foods, like aged cheeses, cured meats [1]; they also are going to be present in fermented foods, citrus foods, so whether it’s grapefruit or oranges, tangerines, lemons and limes, have elevated histamine. Avocados, strawberries, tomatoes, and foods like spinach can be elevated on the histamine food scale.

2. Identify Your “Trigger Foods”

So, to be very conscious of the foods that you eat, and I like to recommend, number two, identifying what we call trigger foods. So, keeping a food diary is what I recommend, and you can use your phone to do that, where you have in your notepad or notate on a calendar, but it’s important to notice the different feelings that food gives you. Often, immediate histamine reactions will be a puffiness sinus kind of effect, runny nose, kind of have the itchiness in your throat, and even hives from eating foods. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have throat closing or it’s anaphylactic shock, but it can be sensitivity. And sometimes it may be you’re eating too many histamine-rich foods, and that’s then causing an overwhelm to your system.

3. Support Your Gut Health

Now, the third recommendation here in things to support lowering histamine is you really want to support your gut health. Your digestive health is a big player in terms of the cytokine reaction. Cytokines are inflammatory cells and cytokines take part in the body, or they’re triggered by body reactions. So, when we are digesting food, that tends to be where the food chemistry and our blood chemistry, our body chemistry interacts, and that can often trigger a cytokine storm or cytokine reaction. Cytokines end up releasing tons of little histamine cells that cause redness and cause irritations, it inflames cells, so you might notice you might even hold onto fluid a little bit more.

And bloating and gas can be effects in the digestive system, so eating and reaching for fiber-dense foods, also reaching for yogurt and kefir, even though it’s fermented, that’s on the lower scale. If you look at fermented food, kefir and yogurt are lower, but they have good bacteria that helps offset some of the imbalances from histamines.

Another thing that I like to recommend is consuming garlic and onions, and even bananas have histamine-lowering properties. And then I also recommend reaching for our ProBiotixx. We have a single strain of the L. plantarum that is powerful for boosting your gut and microbiota balancing so that you can manage and minimize histamine reactions within your digestive system.

4. Metabolize Excess Histamines with DAO Enzyme

Now, fourth is a very powerful enzyme and it’s called DAO, D-A-O, and that stands for diamine oxidase. DAO is a, basically, it’s like a little Pac-Man that gobbles up excess histamines. And so when you use a DAO enzyme, it’s an enzyme that basically breaks up and it sucks in and gets rid of, metabolizes, histamines [2]. So, DAO is a really powerful resource for a lot of my long COVID patients or post-COVID infections. I’m even seeing histamine reactions with my patients who have recovered recently from RSV and the rhinovirus and assorted viruses that were prevalent in the late fall and early winter seasons.

5. Support Your Methylation Process with Greens

And another supportive that can be helpful is to make sure that you are supporting your methylation process. If you know you have MTHFR, which is gene mutation that really affects your methylation of B vitamins, methylation challenges can be affected by histamine [3]. So, you want to maximize your methylation process, meaning eating good leafy greens and adding various supplements, like our OrganiGreens that has a whole bunch of methyl promoters. Those are going to be helpful. And, obviously, reaching for methylfolate and the methylized version of B12 can help offset some of the methylation challenges.

6. Reach for Antioxidant-Rich Foods

And last and final, reach for antioxidant-rich foods. I love to recommend mushrooms, like chaga. I like to recommend kiwi fruit, green tea, and even moringa. Those are powerful antioxidants, very high on the antioxidant scale. Those help to also metabolize and address the single-cell histamines that are causing a lot of inflammatory effect in your body.

Try Natural Ways to Lower Histamine Levels

So, those are six powerful ways that you can lower your histamine levels naturally. If you have any specific questions about these six tips or any others, please comment down below and I will answer in the Ask Doctor Melissa column that we have here on our website blog. Thanks for tuning in.

Organixx ProBiotixx+ formula contains a single, super-strain of Lactobacillus plantarum, designed to help alleviate constipation… eliminate gas and belly bloat… support your entire immune system… and give you total digestive protection.