Trying to sort out food triggers

I am requesting your wisdom and experience with food triggers. I have tried various elimination diets, have given up different food groups, etc. I am not ready to completely go to a rice, chicken, fish and vegetable diet, although I may get that desperate eventually.

Anyway, I continue to read conflicting views about low-tyramine diets. Some indicate that mozzarella cheese, nuts and seeds are OK. Others indicated they are not.

I am confused about dairy. Some indicate it is not OK. Some say milk and cottage, cream and ricotta cheese are OK. What about whey protein? It's a great source of protein, but does the glutamine (glutamate?) in it correspond with MSG and then result in a migraine trigger?

I am confused about leftovers. When is it OK to eat something that is a day old, and how does one determine the histamine content?

Thanks in advance for your ideas.

maggie, i think many of us on this forum have driven ourselves nuts for years and years, re: food triggers.

oftentimes, we eat something and have no reaction, but the next time it puts us down and out. how to figure this out? it is indeed crazy-making.

after 44 years of migraines, along the way i have nailed down several components. you seem to already be aware of all these things which are possibilities only.

if you study up more on MSG by reading a ton of stuff on www.msgmyth.com or www.msgtruth.org, you will find out how MANY items in the american food supply contain either MSG under disguised names, or in the "free glutamate" form, which is just as problematic.

it's all trial-and-error, unfortunately. it helps to have a partner in life who can help you keep track. (i never had this, sob). the only way to be (relatively) sure that a food is doing you in, is this: eat food with no chemicals added.

some of the chemicals are in nearly everything processed, these days; like citric acid. be not fooled; citric acid has never seen a citrus fruit; it's manufactured by a totally chemicalized process.

i don't mean to preach. every one of us is different, so the lists may be helpful but they are never definitive for an individual person. my go-to philosophy of food is ala michael pollan, the popular food writer who is trying to get people to see that what they are eating is NOT food, but food-like substances, fulla crap.

eat it as pure and holy as you can afford to buy. organic is wonderful, but label reading is even more important. organic food can still have a ton of chemicals added. don't you get sick of reading labels?? i do, but i get even more sick (in bed/throwing up) if i don't read each and every ingredient, and shun those which aren't real food ingredients.

in my case, i haven't found tyramine to be an issue, but all the 50-60 names for MSG are. i can't stand to throw away food, so i eat leftovers. i'm poor, and tired, and working at age 72, so i cook FOR leftovers. this may be crazy. don't do it if you can avoid it. just sayin' that i haven't found this issue to be all-important.

here's what i eat, if you'd like to know: no cheese. no chemicalized dairy (with gums, fillers, etc). simple yogurt, cream cheese and cottage cheese recipes are just fine......milk and cultures. (nancy's is one u.s. brand). no pectin or other crap.

lots of nuts and seeds, either raw or toasted (again, with nothing added except salt).

so sorry that we have to be our own sherlocks here; no medical tests or practitioners of any kind can do this experimentation for us. i hope for you that your efforts will yield some highly useful insights! dianne

Thanks, Dianne. It is helpful to know what you are able to eat, but am sorry you have also struggled for so long.

I agree that the list of MSG-like foods is enormous, and I also avoid additives whenever possible. It feels like my food choices are getting smaller and smaller.

I have found that artificial food coloring makes my migraines more painful. I still get migraines everyday but they are merely half as bad as when I was eating food coloring. Sodium nitrite, which is in bacon, ham, and deli meats, will give me a migraine shortly after eating it.

Strangely, I have found no issue with MSG. I cut it out completely, including all the hidden names, and there's been not a tiny difference in my migraines or the pain level. However, I DID notice that after I started eating it again, it can make my heart race. I never noticed that before, I'm sure because I wasn't examining it not because it wasn't there.

Currently I am trying a gluten-free dairy-free diet to see if it helps. Only on day 3, no change so far. From what I understand, sodium caseinate can be an issue, or milk protein, or something like that?

you're welcome, maggie. and yes, the choices are narrowing as we speak. even things that should be safe (from trader joe's, for instance, with no questionable ingredients on the label) can make me a wreck. like today. i've read that food manufacturers can sneak in things in such low amounts that they aren't required to label it as such. great! eating is stepping into a minefield.

seaine, nitrates and nitrites are also killers for me. good for you to make that connection.

as you can imagine, i've been on every elimination diet known to man and woman, through all these years. cutting out food groups never helped me, and i've cut out (one-at-a-time of course) just about all of them. none made a whit of difference. it's a good experiment in self-discipline, though, i suppose.........

and by the way, i've had multiple doctors tell me that literally ANYTHING can be an allergen, and it's the protein part of the food that does the damage. for we folks with "sensitivities" and not true allergies, it's even more confusing and daunting. but every little bit of knowledge helps! dianne

Has anyone ever had a food allergen test done? I'm going to ask my neurologist about it. I know it's not like a true allergy, but who knows maybe something will show up.

Seane I had allergy testing done, as well as elimination diet. Elimination diet has proven useful, but allargy testing was negative - I have no food allergies, yet a suffer from many, many food triggers.

Allergy testing is useless - apart from the fact that it eliminates the issue as a cause of pain which is reassuring.
Allergy is a more severe reaction, which can produce immediate reaction such as a visible rash or life threatening swelling (like allergy to peanuts whereby even traces of peanut can cause severe reaction).
What we exeprince as a trigger is food sensitivity, which is a different thing altogether.

The difference is that with proper allergy the person affected will ALWAYS get bad reaction within a very short period of time, whislt with food sensitivity it triggers reaction only sometimes. This has also been mine and many other people's experince on this forum. Soemtimes we are all right with ceratin triggers, sometimes not.
Allergy would give you reaction every single time.
If you wish to read more on the subject this is a useful link: http://www.webmd.com/allergies/features/food-allergy-myths?page=2

I have a very, very long list of triggers but at the moment I need to make an urgent call so I cannot wrtite all the details.

Ok that's kind of what I was thinking. However I have a close friend who does not get migraines but has celiac disease and many other issues with food and she got a different kind of testing, called IgG test. It's a test for antibodies against foods, but it's not the IgE test which is for allergies.

Supposedly, eliminating foods which show up in an IgG test can help many conditions including IBS, fibromyalgia, and migraines. If you look it up on the internet there seems to be some disagreement over it. I personally think we have nothing to lose, as long as we don't starve ourselves or not get enough vitamins why not give it a try? Although insurance companies probably won't cover the test.

I saw a Dr Oz, where a doctor determined that chronic fatigue could be managed by 1) gluten free diet, 2) taking iodine (many of us suffer from iodine deficiency), 3) drinking dandelion tea twice a day to clean the liver, and 4) performing one nostril yoga breathing twice a day (lowers cortisol and increases testosterone). She herself suffered from chronic fatigue and insomnia until she found out that doing the above would help her.

I think I am going to try the routine to see if it will help with the headaches.

Martin

martin, please do post your experiences with the above regimen. gluten-free, if it's going to help, won't help right away, of course. one must be vigilant; there is gluten is nearly all supermarket food. and the substitutes for it in the various products now flooding the market, are questionable, to say the least.

if you've looked into it, you know they use a variety of strange flours and gums, etc. so the baked goods will stick together. making your own food would, of course, be far preferable. or just giving up baked goodies entirely. not so fun, but maybe worth the trial.

i hope you are very successful!! we need to hear success stories. dianne

If anybody wants any gluten free (gf) advice, please feel free to ask. DH is a celiac, which requires a gf diet. I know the common slip ups, and can tell you there are good gf items out there (Glutino), and others that taste worse than plain rice cakes. If there is a Trader Joe's in your area, its one of the cheapest stores to get good gf foods. For a gf diet without a bunch of replacement foods, look into a Paleo type diet.