In my last post I wrote about the danger of trying to build a life on a cracked foundation. I’ve been trying to turn my life around while operating at less than 50% capacity. Before I can build wealth, create freedom and achieve my goal physique I need to repair my cracked foundation and prioritise my health.
My health mystery is deeply related to my relationship with food. Not because I’m a particularly fat fuck but because I react to everything I eat and it sends me to an abyss of:
Fatigue.
Brain fog.
Scratchy eyes.
Sinus problems.
Lethargy.
Malaise.
And of course the Depression that is a natural accompaniment to feeling like shit every day.
Prior to going Vegan as a 19 year old I never had any of these problems….
Many, many years into my miserable journey after fumbling for answers in the dark, I finally identified my main enemy: Histamine intolerance. Just knowing what you’re fighting can be half the battle so it was a significant breakthrough for me. But it wasn’t an overnight turnaround by any means. Because the unfortunate reality is that there’s no clear blueprint to follow for curing histamine intolerance. Sure there’s some conventional and prevailing wisdom like ‘follow a low-histamine diet and supplement with DAO‘ (the enzyme in the gut responsible for breaking down dietary histamine). But whether you’re new to histamine intolerance – or you too have been battling it for years – I challenge you to find anyone who actually reports long-term recovery with this approach. And that’s because it’s an unsustainable band-aid solution that is all about prevention and not recovery.
So what do you do?
It’s a topic that I have explored previously But obviously the protocol that I described in that post fell short because I haven’t fully recovered yet.
I was on the right track though. As always when endeavouring to solve a problem I tried to reduce the issue to its absolute simplest. And this is the conclusion I arrived at: histamine intolerance is fundamentally a problem with DAO production. We get so caught up in which foods are:
High in histamine
Release histamine
Or degrade histamine breakdown
(which is why things like chocolate, coffee and alcohol fuck me up so bad because they are triple whammys)
But none of those would be a concern if our guts were producing adequate DAO to meet the demands of a modern balanced diet. As most people’s do, and as yours presumably once did before something happened to compromise your gut health (in my case veganism).
What impairs DAO production?
- Damage to the intestinal wall (DAO is primarily produced in the gut lining). ie – leaky gut
- Gut dysbiosis – you can have an overgrowth of a certain ‘bad’ bacteria producing excess histamine or they could be eating at your DAO production.
This is the playbook that I was working from. And so I set to work repairing my leaky gut and rebalancing my gut flora with the protocol described in my previous article: Basically lots of berberine, glutamine, collagen and probiotics (mainly in the form of Kefir). But I overlooked another significant possible cause of inadequate DAO production:
- Nutrient deficiencies. Specifically copper. DAO is a ‘copper-containing’ enzyme, which means copper is absolutely critical for DAO production.
Copper can get a bad rap because of the fear of copper toxicity, and deficiency is considered extremely uncommon. For those reasons it’s hard to find anywhere that sells a copper supplement here in Australia. But do you know what is a really good way to develop a copper deficiency? – Over-supplementing zinc. A popular, freely-available supplement that gets none of the demonisation that copper does. The two have a complex relationship where they need to exist within a balance of each other. Too much of one can suppress the absorption of the other, though both are vital to health – apparently in a ratio of about 8:1 zinc to copper.
Those of us suffering through chronic ailments always dream of that one magic pill. Could curing my histamine intolerance really be this simple? My current hypothesis suggests…. maybe.
You see, in my years of struggle I have seen many different medical practitioners and collected many diagnoses like trophies that validated my misery. One of which, from my functional medicine doctor (the person I’ve seen and relied on the most in this journey), was ‘Pyroluria.’ It’s a controversial condition that is not accepted in mainstream medicine (which never necessarily bothered me – because mainstream medicine has failed utterly to help me) where basically during times of stress some people are purported to lose excessive amounts of zinc and B6 in their urine. Which then causes a vast array of symptoms including anxiety and other mood disorders, and fatigue, etc…. Therefore the protocol is to supplement bucketloads of zinc and B6 (you can see where this is going)… Over the last 5 years I have taken, for periods of months at a time, upwards of 40mg of zinc daily on my doctor’s advice. So I suspect that while I may have been making lots of progress with my gut health on my protocol, possibly fixing my leaky gut and dysbiosis, my histamine intolerance endured as I developed a copper deficiency.
As I think about it there is definitely a pattern of signs that suggest copper may be the missing piece of the puzzle.
– I have had low test results in the past. Not clinically deficient, but borderline with a downward trend. I don’t know what the unit used in Australia is, but the reference range for copper was 9-20 and mine was 11 (having previously been 13). And this is a couple of years ago – there’s been a lot of zinc supplementation since then… Also, though this is purely speculation, I have been going grey since my mid 20s to the point that now at 29 I don’t like to grow my beard out because it’s more than half grey. Early greying can definitely be linked to low copper levels. But, I digress, there’s nothing left to do but test the theory.
Thus, in the last week I have:
– Ceased all zinc supplementation
– Increased my supplementation of beef liver from 1 capsule to 4 (the recommended dose) (second most copper-dense food on the planet)
– Begun eating a tin of smoked oysters per day (most copper-dense food on the planet)
So it’s still early days, but I have been so buoyed by the initial results that I had to write about it as soon as possible. Quite simply my reactivity has reduced significantly:
– Considerably less scratchy eyes and sneezing
– Less foggy
– I feel more socially engaged too. I work in retail so it’s been quite noticeable in the many wholesome customer interactions I’ve had this week.
My general mood has lifted too. It does feel very much like I’ve added something in that’s been sorely lacking, and the veil of fog and depression is lifting accordingly. I haven’t had a huge uptick in my overall energy levels yet though, but I have only slept about 5-6 hours most nights this week (I have a 1 year old). Given the significance of improvement in just a short space of time, I am cautiously optimistic about how much better I can get. Cautious because after 10 years of suffering, I’ve been burned before.
A note on oysters: Of course, oysters aren’t just the most copper-dense food on the planet – they’re also the most zinc-dense. On paper that might look like I’m repeating the same mistake. But unlike isolated zinc supplements, oysters contain copper alongside zinc in a naturally balanced ratio, which may mitigate the antagonistic effect I likely created by hammering high-dose zinc alone for years. If symptoms plateau or labs confirm I’m still low, I’d consider cautiously introducing a low-dose copper supplement (1–2mg daily) for a bit. For now though I’m happy experimenting with my natural food-based approach. I’ve taken enough supplements over the years.
Hope this has provided some food-for-thought for my fellow histamine sufferers out there. Basically, my current belief is that meaningful recovery from histamine intolerance depends on identifying why your body isn’t producing enough DAO: most likely due to gut permeability, bacterial overgrowth or a copper deficiency (or a combination of the three). Also that perhaps there’s a reason why Pyroluria isn’t considered a medically credible diagnosis, and mega-dosing zinc might be doing more harm than good.
Cheers,
Remy
Toomanymind 