Imagine this situation: you decide to take the utmost care of your diet. You start the day with avocado and tomato on toast, have a spinach salad for lunch, and join the kombucha trend for its digestive benefits. However, instead of feeling full of energy, you experience severe migraines, brain fog, unexplained skin problems, or severe abdominal bloating.
What is going wrong? If this story sounds familiar to you, it is highly likely that you do not have a problem with healthy food, but rather a histamine intolerance (also known as histaminosis).
What is histamine and why does it build up?
Histamine is not inherently "bad". It is a vital molecule that our own body produces and which acts as a neurotransmitter, a regulator of stomach acid, and a mediator in immune system responses (it is what makes you sneeze when you have an allergy).
The problem arises when the balance is disrupted. Histamine also enters our body through our diet. In a healthy person, an intestinal enzyme called DAO (Diamine Oxidase) is responsible for breaking down this external histamine. But if your body does not produce enough DAO, or if your gut is compromised, histamine builds up in the blood, unleashing a cascade of problems. In Anglo-Saxon medical literature, this condition is known for its characteristic symptoms: headaches, hives, chronic fatigue, and digestive disorders.
The paradox of histamine-rich foods
One of the biggest challenges of this condition is that the "culprits" are usually pillars of a healthy diet. Histamine-rich foods (or those that stimulate its release in the body) include:
- Avocados, tomatoes, aubergines, and spinach.
- Fermented foods (sauerkraut, kefir, kombucha, yoghurt).
- Aged cheeses and cured meats.
- Tinned or smoked fish.
- Citrus fruits and strawberries.
To ease the burden on the body, specialists often temporarily recommend a low-histamine diet, eliminating these products. However, at Vivabioma we know that restricting foods for life is not the real solution. You have to get to the root of the problem: your gut.
Your microbiota: The central histamine laboratory
What many people (and even professionals) do not know is that histamine processing does not only depend on your human genetics or the DAO enzyme. It depends directly on your gut microbiota.
The bacteria that inhabit your gut play a dual role in this scenario:
- Histamine-producing bacteria: Certain bacterial strains in your gut ferment the amino acids in food and manufacture additional histamine, worsening your symptoms from the inside, regardless of what you eat.
- Histamine-degrading bacteria: On the other hand, a healthy microbiome has beneficial bacteria that actively help to break down histamine and reduce inflammation.
If you have an overgrowth of the former and a deficiency of the latter, not even the strictest diet will be enough to cure you.
With the Advanced and Ultra microbiome tests, we carry out a deep genetic sequencing of your microbiota. We do not just tell you which bacteria you have, but we also analyse their functionality. This means we can evaluate with pinpoint precision your microbiome's actual capacity to process histamine.
What do you achieve with this analysis?
- Identify if there is an excess of histamine-producing bacteria.
- Evaluate the state of your intestinal barrier (key to the production of the DAO enzyme).
- Receive a personalised action plan, which includes recommendations for specific probiotic strains (since many conventional commercial probiotics increase histamine) and precise nutritional guidelines.
Your migraines, skin problems, and unexplained allergies could simply be a cry for help from your gut. Take the step from restriction to knowledge. Understand your unique biology with Vivabioma's analyses and go back to enjoying food without fear.