Following an anti-inflammatory diet is the first crucial step to reducing your chronic inflammation and improving your Endometriosis symptoms. But if you are histamine-intolerant you may be blaming your Endo unfairly!

The inflammation is your immune system’s somewhat over-dramatic response to foods that are not really requiring the response. But we know, your immune system is more sensitive then that of women without Endo.

One of the ways your immune system is triggered is through histamine.

For some of you, the main cause of most of your symptoms might be that you are histamine-intolerant.

So what is histamine?

It is released by cells when they are triggered by an injury, an allergic reaction or by inflammatory reactions.

The best-known example is hay fever: when the pollen come in contact with the mucous membranes in your nose, they trigger an immune response and the cells in your nose release histamine. The role of histamine is to get rid of these invaders. And in the case of hay-fever, the histamine causes you to sneeze and have a runny nose.

Histamine intolerance in Endometriosis means your body doesn’t tolerate histamine and it overreacts to the presence of histamine.

There are two possible reasons for this:

1. You could have chronically raised histamine levels. Your body’s normal response to raised levels of any compound is to try to reduce it back to normal levels. But after a while the body becomes irritated and an intolerance is created. Histamine levels can be raised because of food allergies, genetics, histamine-rich foods, allergies (non-food), bacterial overgrowth or imbalance, leaky gut, or fermented alcohol (beer, wine, spirits).

2. Your body is not able to remove histamine properly. So histamine keeps circulating in your body, creating a constant immune response. This may be because of diamine oxidase (an enzyme that removes excess histamine) deficiency.

If you think you might have an histamine intolerance, sign up for my “12 Weeks to Eat Your Way to Less Pain” and discover if the anti-histamine diet might be the answer for you.