Before we look at what you can and cannot eat in a low-histamine diet, let’s see how food and histamine are connected.

There are 4 types of interactions between food and histamine.

Foods that contain high levels of histamine: eating these is just adding lots of histamine to your system, directly triggering your immune response.

We’re talking about alcohol; pickled or canned food; matured cheeses; smoked, processed meat products (sausages, ham etc); shellfish; beans, pulses and peanuts; walnuts and cashews; vinegar; tomatoes; avocados; eggplant; spinach; most citrus fruit; anything that contains cocoa; ready meals; salty snacks; lollies; anything that contains colourings and/or preservatives.

There are some foods on this list you wouldn’t eat on an anti-inflammatory diet either, but also some healthy fruit and vegetables.

Foods that make it easier for histamine-containing foods to release that histamine: the enablers.

All the foods on the previous list also make it easier for other foods to release their histamine. So combining a tomato with an avocado, some spinach and a sausage is more than a quadruple whammy!

And egg white is another food that enables the release of histamine.

Foods that prevent histamine from being removed from your body: so even if you don’t add any histamine to your body, these foods will keep whatever amount is in your system flowing around your body.

These are mostly drinks: alcohol; black tea; energy drinks; green tea; mate tea, and yeast (so beer is double trouble).

And finally, the foods you can eat on a low-histamine diet: foods that contain little or no histamine. The good ones!

Fortunately, there is still a reasonable range of foods to choose from: fresh meat, chicken and fish; egg yolk; most fresh fruits; most vegetables and herbs; gluten-free wholegrains; coconut, rice, almond and macadamia milk; vegetable cooking oil; most herbal teas; most non-citrus whole-fruit fruit juices.

To find out if you are histamine-intolerant, you eat from this list only for one week.

• If you see an improvement in your symptoms, you know you have an intolerance to histamine and may need to continue with the low-histamine diet.
• If you don’t notice any change, you could add another week to make sure, or just stick to an anti-inflammatory diet.

If you do notice a difference, and think histamine might be a problem for you, please let me know. We want to make sure that we adjust your diet, so you still get all the nutrients you need, by finding good alternatives to the histamine foods.