Monday Morsels: Histamine Help #3
It’s #mondaymorsels day, a brief post about a food you’ll want to add to your grocery list. This food, as always, will be related to the main topic of the month! This month, we’re talking ways Nutrition can support through histamine mediated troubles.
Click on the image to get the full exploration of today’s find.
Mondays, as always here on the blog, we build your grocery list with one food, focusing on this month’s main topic - histamines.
So let’s dive in to another one of those best foods to help you move through histamine mediated troubles with a bit more ease.
MORINGA.
Let’s get in to the reasons you may wish to add this to your grocery list…
BECAUSE PREVENTING HISTAMINE RELEASE
There are a few key compounds found in Moringa leaf (Moringa oleifera) including quercitin and kaempferol that have been shown to inhibit Mast Cells from dumping histamine, both in early and late phases of a body’s natural reaction. (1)
BECAUSE PROTECTION FROM INFLAMMATION
Other compounds found in the seeds of moringa (β-sitosterol) was shown to be protective against inflammation in the respiratory tracts of animals that had asthma. (So sorry, guinea pigs. But there you go. Science.) These compounds were shown to help reduce the release of inflammatory compounds like Th2 cytokines that drive the inflammatory response. (2) What’s behind histamine issues, in many cases? Low grade inflammation…
BECAUSE IMMUNE LOVE
If you understand that it is the immune system that is releasing histamine via your mast cells (a type of white blood cell!), then consuming those foods that deeply nourish and help care for your immune system is one of the tactics to helping reduce histamine mediated troubles. Because of its multiple immune regulatory abilities, moringa fits the bill here! (3) Think of Moringa as a metabolic supporter, loaded with antioxidants to help bust inflammation + do the clean up afterwards (in order to protect the body!), it is protective to many different organs and body systems. Moringa for the delicious win!
One of the things to know about moringa though - it is super high in oxalates. For some, foods high in oxalates can drive histamine issues or further exacerbate symptoms when Mast Cell Activation is a part of the picture. When your sink is full (refer to this blog post to understand what it is I’m talking about here), moringa may not be the ally you need.
Once you start working at reducing what is contributing to the tap being on all the time, and once you start working at improving the drainage at the bottom of the sink, then bringing in moringa may be of benefit. Looking for a low histamine green that won’t trip things when your sink feels full? Try arugula! It’s low in oxalate, and will not contribute to histamine mediated troubles.
Aiming to Keep Well? Working through what you wonder might be histamine related issues? Need some help in feeling real good?
Get in touch by clicking here. Let’s meet up to start drawing up your road map to support you in both quantity and quality of life.
*This is not medical advice.
Monday Morsels: Histamine Help #2
It’s #mondaymorsels day, a brief post about a food you’ll want to add to your grocery list. This food, as always, will be related to the main topic of the month! This month, we’re talking ways Nutrition can support through histamine mediated troubles.
Click on the image to get the full exploration of today’s find.
Mondays, as alwasy here on the blog, we build your grocery list with one food, focusing on this month’s main topic - histamines.
So let’s dive in to another one of those best foods to help you move through histamine mediated troubles with a bit more ease.
NIGELLA SEED. Also known as kalonji.
Let’s get in to the reasons you may wish to add this to your grocery list…
BECAUSE GUT LOVE
Thymoquinone (TQ) is the main active component of nigella seeds, and nigella seed oil. Preliminary studies are showing some protective effect of this seed on the mucosal lining of the gut (ok in rats, but someday maybe in humans?). TQ helped lower histamine release in the gut where there was known gut leakage. What's at the root of histamine troubles for some? LEAKY GUT.
BECAUSE INFLAMMATION
Nigella is a brilliant anti-inflammatory herb. What's at the root of many troubles with histamines? Chronic inflammation! (2)
BECAUSE CALM
Nigella seed has been studied for its protective effect on the Central Nervous System. In mice (someday humans I hope!) studies show that this potent seed enhances the work of GABA, a calming neurotransmitter. (3)
Check out your favourite health food store to get a live, non-irradiated product in order to glean the benefits of this potent seed. Look for Nigella Seeds or nigella oil. They are sometimes labelled Kalonji seeds (traditional Indian name), black seeds, or Black Cumin Seeds. My fave spots where I see it all the time: at The Light Cellar, and Amaranth Whole Foods in Arbour Lake.
I have also seen nigella seeds in honey, from Shaganappi Grocer here in Calgary.
And hey - they grow into the most beautiful flowers. Annuals here in Calgary! Grow your own + harvest the seeds!
Aiming to Keep Well? Working through what you wonder might be histamine related issues? Need some help in feeling real good?
Get in touch by clicking here. Let’s meet up to start drawing up your road map to support you in both quantity and quality of life.
*This is not medical advice.
Monday Morsels: Histamine Support #1
It’s #mondaymorsels day, a brief post about a food you’ll want to add to your grocery list. This food, as always, will be related to the main topic of the month! This month, we’re talking ways Nutrition can support through histamine mediated troubles.
Click on the image to get the full exploration of today’s find!
Mondays, we build your grocery list with one food, focusing on this month’s main topic - histamines.
So let’s dive in to one of those best foods to help you move through histamine mediated troubles with a bit more ease.
FRESH HERBS!
For those who wish to know the ‘why’ behind this idea, I’ll give you three things to think about.
BECAUSE DIGESTIVE SUPPORT
Fresh herbs are abundant in live enzymes, especially when consumed fresh. These enzymes are naturally occurring in herbs; they help support that breaking-foods-down job your digestive system has to do. The better you can break down foods, the less stress on your immune system. (Yep. She’s the back-up worker bee who’ll intercept anything that comes into the body not quite digested.)
The less stress on your immune system, the less she’ll feel embattled. The less she feels embattled, the less histamine her mast cells will be releasing.
Incidentally - when you chase flavour, you enhance your body’s ability to digest. Fresh herbs? One of my favourite flavour delivery systems!
BECAUSE MAST CELL STABILIZING
Lots of the fresh herbs available out there (either via your balcony, garden or grocery store) are wonderful sources of quercetin. Quercetin is a compound that has been shown to help stabilize mast cells! (1) Other compounds found in fresh herbs include luteolin (2) and rutin (3) (aka Vitamin P), two polyphenols showing good promise in supporting a reduction in allergic type reactions on the body involving histamine. Where are they plentiful? In fresh herbs!
If you understand that mast cells, when activated release histamine, then anything you can do to help stabilize mast cells will go miles in reducing possible histamine mediated troubles.
BECAUSE MINERALS
The more your body has to mount an inflammatory or protective mechanism (read: dumping of histamine) then the more you’ll need the ingredients to mount the reaction so that your body can protect you. One of those nutrients your body needs in abundance when histamine is a reality is MAGNESIUM. (4)
Dark leafy greens to the rescue! Except…. some dark leafy greens are tricky to digest for some who may be struggling with digestion or leaky gut. (And in the scenario of possible histamine issues, there is always a good indication to dive in to see well the body is able to digest, and how well the intestinal lining is doing in order to produce that all important histamine-degrading enzyme called DAO at the gut level.) Some dark leafy greens make it downright tricky to get at the nutrients found within for those who are struggling with lots of inflammation and a reduced digestive fire. Think things like oxalates, goitrogens that can disrupt thyroid function, and a few others.
Know what packs a similar nutritional punch without providing some of those troublesome compounds? FRESH HERBS!
Pesto, like this low histamine version soon to be featured in Histamine Haven is a great way to pack a punch while helping keep histamine troubles low! Photo by Eluvier Acosta.
Where to start?
Mince fresh herbs, and add to all meals. They’re wonderful allies and easy to toss on to each and every dish out there.
Get to know chimichurri, and pesto. We’ll be featuring two recipes in the upcoming Histamine Haven guide + cookbook.
Know this: sprouts are also a wonderful ally. I did a post on these histamine busting plant allies back in the fall of 2020. Check it out here!
Aiming to Keep Well? Working through what you wonder might be histamine related issues? Need some help in feeling real good?
Get in touch by clicking here. Let’s meet up to start drawing up your road map to support you in both quantity and quality of life.
*This is not medical advice.
Monday Morsels: Burden of Stress support #5
It’s #mondaymorsels day, a brief post about a food you’ll want to add to your grocery list. This food, as always, will be related to the main topic of the month! This month, we’re talking ways Nutrition can support a high personal burden of stress.
Click on the image to get the full exploration of today’s find!
Mondays, we build your grocery list with one food, focusing on this month’s main topic.
For the month of May, we have been focusing on those best foods to help support a reduction in your own personal burden of stress. Today, one last one. Let’s talk…
FERMENTED FOODS. If you can tolerate them.
For those who wish to know the ‘why’ behind this idea, I’ll give you three things to think about.
BECAUSE GUT LOVE + ANTI-INFLAMMATORY WORK
Are you seeing a pattern in these posts yet? (week 1 not inherently mentioned, week 2, week 3, week 4) When you are tackling reducing that high burden of stress, it will always be about reducing chronic inflammation internally. That work lies in reducing the troubles at ground zero - THE GUT.
Fermented foods are one of those crucial supports to put in place, when it comes to nourishing the gut lining and looking after the correct pH there. When you do this, you start to support a return to balance at that gut level and knock out less desirable gut bacteria. (Need more convincing? Read this article.) This is a key piece to supporting work at ground zero!
Want to learn more about the Gut as Ground Zero? Well listen chum, I have a few free Master Class for you. Check it out here!
BECAUSE LIVER SUPPORT
One of the benefits of consuming fermented foods is that they provide easier-to-access vitamins and minerals needed for your liver’s work load. Think of the ferments as allies in supporting the liver to do the digestive piece of her workload. Who doesn’t love to have a little help every now and then? Your liver is no different!
Things like B vitamins, vitamin C and minerals like zinc and magnesium are easier to get out of the foods when they are fermented. Vitamin C is one of those all-round liver lovin superstars that helps with detoxification, and immune function. (Oh yes - your immune function is all governed by your liver. Were you aware of this?)
Your liver is queen of working at clean up and balancing when it comes to supporting you through a high burden of stress. She is a key player in hormone and blood sugar balancing, two things that can get impacted when that burden of stress is high. Loving your liver? One of the best foot forward things you can do!
BECAUSE ANCESTRAL WISDOM
Again. For the FOURTH time. Listen. This is how the people who came before you ate. This is how they put up the 140 cabbages that came up in October. Ain’t nobody got enough chewing prowess to get through that much coleslaw, let me tell you… Fermenting foods was how you put up milk that was about to go bad; fermenting foods was how you made the cabbage last into the leaner late winter / spring months. Fermenting grains was how you made sourdough.
Fermenting foods makes them easier to digest - your grans and gramps were on to something!
Anything fermented! Dill pickles, creme fraiche, yogurt, kimchi, apple cider vinegar, shredded beets, kraut… it all counts!
Where to start?
START SLOW. And buy purchased stuff. Not sure how to get about doing that very thing? I have a blog post on the topic here.
Want to start learning to make your own? I’m building a simple program to walk you through how to make your own. Hang tight. Coming in the summer of 2021!
Can’t tolerate fermented foods? Have you ever given thought as to whether or not histamine may be contributing to your symptoms? (Lucky you - I know this one personally. Hit me up if you have questions about this, and what you could do instead.)
In the meantime, for those curious to understand WHY the gut is ground zero of this high burden of stress business, why don’t you take my free Master Class for a spin. It’s available here!
Aiming to Keep Well? Got a high burden of stress? Want to start taming that inflammation dragon? Need some help in feeling real good?
Get in touch by clicking here. Let’s meet up to start drawing up your road map to support you in both quantity and quality of life.
*This is not medical advice.
Monday Morsels: Burden of Stress support #4
It’s #mondaymorsels day, a brief post about a food you’ll want to add to your grocery list. This food, as always, will be related to the main topic of the month! This month, we’re talking ways Nutrition can support a high personal burden of stress.
Click on the image to get the full exploration of today’s find!
Mondays, we build your grocery list with one food, focusing on this month’s main topic.
For the month of May, we zero in on those best foods to help support a reduction in your own personal burden of stress. Today, let’s talk…
ORGAN MEATS.
For those who wish to know the ‘why’ behind this idea, I’ll give you three things to think about.
BECAUSE GUT LOVE + ANTI-INFLAMMATORY WORK
Much like last week’s post, and the one the week before, if you understand that a personal high burden of stress is really code for chronic inflammation, then it will make sense that in order to lower your own personal burden of stress, you need to look at reducing your body’s own inflammation going on.
Liver is a wonderful source of the animal version of Vitamin A (retinol) which is needed for a robust mucosal lining in the gut. That is your line of defence against the outside world! Building a robust lining there is a key piece to keeping your burden of stress down.
Organ meats are the secret sauce to helping reduce inflammation. They’re chock full of important nutrients like all the B vitamins (in their useable form, no less!) that is a necessary piece for your liver to do all the work she does. They also offer lots of choline, a key nutrient needed for liver and eye health, and all metabolic work.
Your liver is queen of clean up crew; she’s the orchestrator of your immune response; she is the hormone maker + clearer, and works in tandem with your pancreas to balance blood sugars. She kinda does all the things that are impacted by low grade chronic inflammation! The deeper you nourish the liver, the better you support metabolic health + everything that goes with it. This means reducing inflammation! Think heart, liver, kidneys, sweetbreads, bone marrow, tongue, and sure, brain. Get your offal on, kitten!
BECAUSE HORMONE + BLOOD SUGAR BALANCING
At the root of a higher burden of stress lie blood sugar and/or hormonal imbalances. Think of them as accelerators to the burden of stress. These two issues are well served by deep nutrition - you can literally nourish through these imbalances to help restore improved function in both cases! And quite often, the work is quite the same.
Kidney, heart and liver offer a fantastic amount of important minerals like Zinc, Selenium, Copper and Iron in balanced amounts, needed to nourish the body deeply. Those who are dealing with a high personal burden of stress tend to burn through certain nutrients at a faster rate: namely minerals, B vitamins and vitamin C. These are all nutrients needed to do the work of blood sugar and hormone balancing! And so I propose we nourish the body in order to support her through the work of resetting imbalances. Biggest bang for your buck? ORGAN MEATS.
Need more convincing? Check this out.
BECAUSE ANCESTRAL WISDOM
Again. For the third time. Listen. This is how the people who came before you ate. They feasted and used all parts of every animal they had to slaughter. Nothing was left to waste, every piece of the animal had a function. Organ meats were celebrated, and in fact were often the first piece to be consumed soon after slaughter. (1) Gram for gram, liver (especially beef liver) is the most nutrient dense food there is out there: nutrient density means more nutrients for the number of grams and/or calories consumed. It doesn’t take much!
Chicken offal - hearts, liver, kidneys…
Where to start? Find some liver páté you like at the grocery store. Source the good stuff from happy animals if you can, i.e. pastured sources.
Want to try cooking your own organ meats? Check this post out. Great variety of organ meats and recipes on offer there.
I recently tried the Ancient Blend puck of pastured ground beef from Gemstone Grass Fed Beef that I purchased at Amaranth Whole Foods in the NW of Calgary. 30% of the meat in the pound of ground is made up of organ meats. A great way to bring it in without having to change how you cook! Use as you would to make tacos, chili, spaghetti sauce, meatballs, burgers, etc.
I’m building some resources to share recipes soon. Hoping to publish before the end of the month, so keep your eyes peeled. (And sign up for the newsletter if you haven’t gotten it yet!)
Aiming to Keep Well? Got a high burden of stress? Want to start taming that inflammation dragon? Need some help in feeling real good?
Get in touch by clicking here. Let’s meet up to start drawing up your road map to support you in both quantity and quality of life.
*This is not medical advice.