Men's Fitness Online

When hormones go bad: a personal account of how a histamine intolerance gets real ugly, real fast.

It’s 2 or 3 am and you’re lying in the shower, surrounded by your filth, so weak that you’re lying on the tiles breathing heavily because it feels like you can’t fill your lungs. Lying there, you genuinely think you’re going to die. Then 60 minutes later you flop back in bed. You drop off to sleep and remain so, only to awake the next day feeling 100% fine, if not a little bewildered. What was that all about? If anything like this has happened to you, you may have experienced the acute symptoms of a histamine overload.

How do I know? This is what used to happen to me periodically, and it took nearly a decade to figure out that it was histamine-related. During this time, I experienced these attacks about every month. There seemed no discernible pattern of diet or behavior that preceded these horrible nocturnal bouts. It was bewildering as the causes of these attacks were/are counter-intuitive, complicated, and not common knowledge, even among doctors. They are more so now. (Google: anti-histamine diet.)

I’m posting this because over those ten years, I saw over a dozen general practitioners, two cardiologists, one gut doctor, and one kindly naturopath and I still was none the wiser as to what caused this awful nocturnal reaction. It was Dr Google that finally led me to the cause — histamine intolerance or possibly Mast Cell Activation Syndrome.

So thought I’d write this as some form of help because if you are suffering the way I did (God help you) and are trawling through Google looking for an answer and you stumble upon this post, hopefully, this might help you.

Before we get into what’s going on, let me say I’m not a medical professional. I like researching and writing and have googled the shit out of histamine and lived through it, so this is simply my experience and I offer it as a possible guide maybe,

So let’s start with histamine 101. Histamine is a natural chemical found throughout the natural world, from plants to human cells. Histamine is released by the mast cells in your body as a reaction to foreign, seemingly toxic elements. Its purpose is to help rid the body of these foreign agents by setting off a whole raft of physical and chemical reactions. If you’ve ever suffered hay fever or hives or had an embarrassing sneeze attack in spring, you’ve felt the effects of histamine. I like to imagine that evolution created it so our ancestors could withstand bee stings, nettle rash, and the like, and still function. If a Neanderthal wanted a quick 3.00pm sugar hit, he could stick his hand in the beehive, grab a few scoops, suffer a few bee stings, and not die of toxic shock thanks to histamine doing its job.

Anyway, if histamine is the yin, Diamine Oxidase (DAO) is the yang. It’s made in the body to break down histamine. You see, the human body is not predominantly a mechanical appliance, with levers, joints, bones, and muscles. It’s more a giant chemistry set, with a symphony of chemical reactions driving many of our daily activities. Hunger and satiety, for example, is a dance between ghrelin and leptin. Leptin is a hormone, made by fat cells, that decreases your appetite. Ghrelin is a hormone that increases appetite and also plays a role in body weight. The two carry out a little pas-de-deux all day, every day, making you hungry, then full, then hungry.

Histamine and DAO are like ghrelin and leptin. Every day they move like tides, rising and falling, building your defenses should a foreign agent make its way into your body, then breaking the histamine down to not let the defense poison its host. This is what should happen. If your histamine level gets topped up by histamine-rich foods, or something subdues your productions or DAO, what follows could happen.

I snap awake always between 2 am and 3 am. Something’s wrong. While my mind is foggy and the house very quiet, my body is alarmed. Something is very wrong. My heart is racing at around 120 bpm, despite lying still. I feel weird, nauseous, disorientated. It’s scary.

You see, the histamine production in your body follows your circadian rhythm. So histamine builds all day, and the DAO breaks it down at night. When you are in the deepest sleep, your body should be rebalancing histamine with the production of DAO. You should snooze soundly through all of this. But if there’s an imbalance…

The first indication of an attack is the rapid drop in blood pressure. “The effect histamine has on blood vessels is crucial to its role in the immune response,” says Brittanica.com. “Injured tissue mast cells release histamine, causing the surrounding blood vessels to dilate and increase in permeability.”

When your blood vessels do dilate and become more permeable, the blood pressure drops, fast. Because the histamine isn’t from a sting, but a massive imbalance, the histamine dump is all-pervasive. My whole body is covered with huge blotches of red and welts that look like domestic abuse. It’s as if I’m blotchy and sunburnt.

The low blood pressure leaves you unable to stand and worse still, feeling like you can’t fill your lungs with air no matter how deep you breathe. So you lie down. I find the bathroom convenient because of what comes next. And experience has taught me a warm shower, for some reason, brings mild relief.

So while your heart’s racing and you’re fighting to breathe, histamine also induces a strong nausea that can’t be ignored. The vomiting is, well, procedural. Nothing comes up, but the compulsion does not stop for up to 60 minutes. Suffice to say, by the end of it, you well could have developed a six-pack.

Here’s the worst bit. Histamine increases stool motility, too. That means you need to take a dump. Urgently. Now I’m not talking about watery diarrhoea, but an overpowering impulse to evacuate your bowels as you do daily. But it’s urgent and protracted and at 3 am. Just to make this a fun night, this urge strikes when you’re lying down, gasping for air like a landed fish, vomiting up bile. And it goes on for up to an hour.

When the body is purged of histamine and rebalanced, homeostasis returns. After about an hour, the heart returns to normal. Then the nausea suddenly. Within 10 minutes, it’s all over. You’re left tired and with a disgusting mess to clean up, but alive. If this sounds familiar, or parts of it do, investigate histamine and start changing your diet. You can (mostly) avoid these types of attacks with a well-managed diet. Here’s a brief overview of diets.