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thebibliosphere:
caveate:
thebibliosphere:
I’d been saving up for one of those portable ninja air fryers for a while, thinking it might help me have better access to safe food when we have to travel/spend time with family over the holidays. (The risk of cross contamination when sharing oven spaces/stovetops is just too high when you have an anaphylactic reaction to gluten so I just often… don’t get to eat for several hours.)
The fact that our oven is broken right now is just serendipitous.
Anyway. This might be the best $150 I’ve ever spent. That chicken was done before I had time to finish doing the dishes to eat it off of.
And the faster cook time means it’s lower in histamine and the texture is like, actually good??? Like what???? I can bring fresh food to my MIL’s, keep it separate from everyone else in the kitchen and just commandeer a wall socket for 20 minutes and have a whole ass meal with protein and vegetables???? I can eat safely at other people’s houses again???!?
I am having too many emotions for an air fryer but like… I never get to eat with other people anymore. I honestly might be about to cry.
“faster cook time means it’s lower in histamine”
Wait.
The FUCK?
Wait, is that why slow cooked meats always make me react and burgers or 20 min oven baked chicken breast doesn’t?
Holy fucking shit. This article focuses on South Korean foods, but it shows what happens with some foods.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5705351/
Currently deep in the weeds looking for more science articles about this. This could be a massive diet changer for me, for the better!
Anything that involves slow cooking or fermentation can raise histamine levels enough to be a problem for people with histamine issues. It’s why so many “healthy” foods seem to cause problems for us and why some people need to be a whole lot less shitty about some people saying “fast food” is better for them. (tbh they need to be less shitty about what people choose to put in their bodies full stop.)
Bone broth, for example, makes me extremely ill. As does yoghurt and a bunch of other stuff.
Also, be mindful of leftovers. Freeze any leftovers within 2 hours of cooking to prevent further histamine build-up. The longer cooked foods (especially meat) sit in the refrigerator, the more histamine develops.
Beef is also inherently higher in histamine than other meats, such as lamb or poultry, because it’s aged for a minimum of 2 weeks to develop flavor.
And just to clarify again, before anyone rolls their eyes at any of this: histamine is not bad. It is, in fact, incredibly beneficial and necessary for immune system regulation, wound healing, and, yeah, developing the flavor of many nutritionally dense and flavorful foods.
This is also why MSG affects some people poorly. It’s not unhealthy, it’s just a histamine liberator, and some people can struggle with that–but those same people will also generally struggle with aged cheeses and tomatoes, and other foods where MSG naturally occurs.
It’s just us folks with some form of mast cell dysfunction/histamine processing issues who need to be mindful of it. It’s us. Not the foods.
If I might humbly ask a few questions of your expertise, I am attempting to navigate my apparent histamine sensitivities and it’s very daunting and I am confuse.
To be fair I asked for doctor supervision and I got told “science just isn’t there yet with these ‘sensitivities’ ” and “start with the top 8 most common allergens. Only do one at a time for two weeks each” and that was kinda it from that allergist?
I’ve been attempting to figure it out alone and even found the John Hopkins list of high histamine foods and it’s just so fucking long 🙃🙃🙃 and yes says things like “leftovers bad” and I’m just so much more lost and intimidated by it all.
I have to recognize my privilege, I am pretty certain that I am not in “can only eat 20 things” (much less 2! 😨😨😨) territory but like I already lost gluten. And oats because my body thinks they are gluten. Or they’re super cross contaminated?? Idunno. I get dermatitis herptaformis and I reacted to certified gluten free tortillas recently that were made with “modified food starch” which can apparently be made from wheat but the act of processing it makes it no longer gluteny according to the FDA standards? My body disagreed with that ruling?? 🙃🙃🙃 and gluten is in literally everything forever.
You also have the brain things similar to me. The fucking ADHD or whatever that also makes food hard. And fatigue. How cook fresh all the time when fatigue??? Slow cooker is my friend 😭😭😭 slow cooker is baaaad??? How do easy food? How do ANY food given the fact that almost every fresh veggie and fruit in my world is on the high histamine list?????
I’m sorry you’re going through this; it really is incredibly daunting knowing where to start
Unfortunately, your allergist is right, and this is very much a trial-and-error kinda thing. The way it should be done (and not the way I was told to do it, which is why I have so much more damage now than I should) is to pick one food at a time and eliminate it.
Personally, I don’t think 2 weeks is enough. I would eliminate a chosen food for a month and see how you feel at the end of each month–especially if you have a menstrual cycle because the onset of menstruation and ovulation can also raise histamine sensitivity due to the fluctuations in estrogen, so sometimes you may find you can eat some foods fine at one time of the month, and not the other.
So, here’s what you do. (Going to put this under a cut because of length)
Keep a detailed food diary.
Before you eliminate anything, start a detailed food diary of what you do eat and any symptoms that might occur. I always start on the first of the month because I have a physical calendar to flip over, as well as alerts on my phone to remind me to do it and get past the ADHD gremlins.
So, for one whole month, keep a daily food diary with space to document symptoms, whether physical, emotional, or mental.
After that month, you have an established baseline.
Now, it’s time to pick a food to eliminate for the next month. Look back at your food diary and look at Bad Symptom days. What did you eat that day or in the days prior, because histamine often builds up?
Say… you had strawberries three days in a row, and on the third/fourth day, your body pitched a fit. That’s a high-histamine food, and you ingested it multiple times in a row. Maybe once a week is fine, but potentially not every day.
So, you take your food diary and you do the same thing as before, but this time you make sure there are no strawberries in anything you eat. Continue documenting symptoms, and then, at the end of the month, compare them to your baseline.
Did removing the potential trigger food from your diet affect your symptoms?
No effect: Put it back in.
Yes, I felt better: Eliminate from your diet.
Hard to tell: Try again later.
Next month, pick another food you suspect might be an issue. Rinse and repeat.
I know this sounds impossible, but if you suspect you have histamine issues, this needs to become a priority for you, as once the cat is out of the bag, it becomes increasingly challenging to get mast cells back under control. This is where you need to put your time and energy for now, but I want you to know that the documenting process isn’t forever, and you do find ways to make it work.
The goal of the low histamine diet isn’t to whittle your foods down to the bare minimum; it’s to find the worst offenders and hope that removing them from your diet makes your ability to tolerate other things easier. We’re trying to increase your histamine tolerance window by removing the battering ram that’s hitting it. Does that make sense?
As for how to make things easier? I am now fully on team air fryer. I’m considering buying the bigger one at some point so I can fit an entire meal into it at once without needing to switch the glass bowls the Ninja thing came with, so I can make large batches of my safe foods, then freeze them.
Which is another thing that will make all this easier. Meal prep as much as you can. I normally make enough of my safe foods to last 1-2 weeks and throw them in my freezer so I can thaw/reheat them and preserve my mental and physical energy between meal prep as much as possible.
Also, be aware of gluten; it can stick to things like Teflon, silicone, wood, cast iron, and plastic, so if you are still having gluten problems despite eliminating gluten from your diet, it could be your cookware/chopping boards/storage containers.
We had to replace everything in our kitchen that wasn’t glass or stainless steel when I got my diagnosis. It was heartbreaking, but it needed to be done. Also, replace your toaster if you have one. Or have a dedicated gluten-free toaster.
Any and all appliances you now buy are gluten-free, and you get my permission to murder anyone who puts gluten in them.
I know this is long, but I hope some of it was helpful. Good luck. I wish you well in your health journey.
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