Migraine Advice from someone who has suffered for years!

To make a long story short, I have had migraines for 20+ years, I am 38 yrs old, female. I am on an anti-depressant, topamax, beta-blocker (propranol), migrelief, for the migraines. I have at least 2-3 a week that last 2-3 days each. I am pretty much always in pain.
I went and saw a new neurologist who sent me to physical therapy 2x a week, which is helping a little, but what has helped the most is a food journal. I had journaled in the past and food did not seem to be related, but all of a sudden I found a common denomenator. I stumbled across it because one day I was feeling a grade 5 headache and I ate a ramen noodle package, 1 hr later it was a level 9. I realized that I had a reaction to MSG. This migraine lasted 2 days. The third day, I was feeling a little better and ate a little ham for dinner and BOOM, back to the migraine. I noticed in my past to stay away from hot dogs, but never did I remember ham to be a problem, until I thought back to our Easter and Christmas dinner, both nights I had migraines. I thought about my weekends, how I always have migraines, that is because when my boyfriend is here, he cooks bacon and sausage, which are also triggers for me. I found that sodium nitrates and potassium nitrites along with MSG have been the cause for over 70% of my migraines.
Hope this will help someone else out there like me.

the title of this post sounds like a spammer is here, but this is legit. i have also found that MSG and its many, many euphemisms for substances which act like MSG in the body........are definite triggers.

folks would do well to research and keep track of the food they are eating. it is often enlightening, as buckkiller has found.

dianne (43 years with this monstrous disorder, and i still get plenty of migraines from OTHER stuff, like environmental chemicals, etc.)

I totally agree with this post...

I have suffered migraines for 20 or so years, am now aged 39 and was getting pretty much one migraine after another each lasting up to 5 days. I tried all the drugs over the years but the one option I did not try consistently until the last few months is an elimination diet. I tried on a few occasions but because I noticed no improvements after a few days I would give up.

1 year ago I moved from the UK to Italy and my migraines suddenly got MUCH worse, if that was possible. I knew that something must be causing it and realised that the only thing that had changed was my diet. I was eating a lot more salami, cured hams and parmesan cheese.

I decided to do some research when I was feeling well enough as at this point I was pretty much taking daily triptans just to function. I searched the internet and found a common theme among all my triggers, they all contain tyramines.

I decided to once and for all cut ALL foods out of my diet that could potentially be a problem and took my diet right back to basics. I cut out all artificial food, MSG, sweetners, additives, basically anything processed or manmade, anything out of a packet is banned for me. I also cut out berries, nuts, alcohol, cured meats, nitrates, chocolate, all cheeses, ripened fruits, anything that is high in tyramines. Yogurts are also lethal for me as the contain aspartame, most of them anyway.

I can't tell you how much this has changed my life, I am now migraine free for almost 3 months except for a monster of a migraine over christmas when I indulged in chocolate, brazil nuts and alcohol on christmas eve and was ill for 5 days after. The migraine started literally 20 mins after eating the brazil nuts.

I have now reached the conclusion that my 20 year migraine battle has been caused purely by my diet....and not by hormones as I believed for years. My last 3 periods passed by with no migraine at all.

I would recommend to any migraine sufferer to please give this a try. I know its not the only cause of migraine but I had given up hope of ever feeling normal and now I have my life back! Please persevere with it for at least a few weeks, a few days isn't long enough to notice and improvement. I have noticed that if I eat anything that triggers me I feel 'headachy' for up to two weeks after, it takes that long for the problem food to leave your system completely.

My worst triggers appear to be nitrates though as the original poster says, so any hotdogs, bacon, packaged ham, sausages, tinned meat can leave me with a monster migraine in 30 mins.

Glad to see you've made the connection! I've tried eliminated MSG and nitrates and the like. No effect here. I did discover that aspartame is a major trigger for me, though. Give a Diet Coke and I will get a major migraine in minutes!!

i was amazed that nitrates cause migraines and didnt make the connection that my corned beef and beetroot sandwich could make me so ill. no ham, no pork, no bacon, no cheese, no red grapes, yikes i dont eat any of that and it sucks but so do migraines. I have one at the moment, please pray for me

I would have loved it if eliminating foods made such a significant dent in my migraines, but sadly it has not. I don't eat any meat, no artificial sweeteners, no MSG ( which masquerades as soy protein isolate, barley malt extract and other innocuous sounding ingredients.) Hence, being a vegetarian, I eat few of the soy products on the market, as most have MSG in them.

The only foods that definitively trigger migraines for me are walnuts and bananas. I am also careful with aged cheese just in case. With all these precautions have taken and with doing several elimination diets over the years, I still have frequent, chronic migraines.

For many if not most chronic migraineurs, food is a minor trigger, to be overshadowed by other triggers such as weather,hormones and sleep. And as in my case, unknown triggers as well.

Hey, if something works for you, great, but with this complex disease, certainly one size does not fit all!

Happy pain free days to all...