What is a food intolerance?
We define it as “the loss of health due to the continued and moderate consumption of food in good condition”, so that toxic reactions or those due to very large meals are excluded from this concept. The concept is intuitively as broad as it is diffuse, but from my point of view it is essential to know the mechanism by which health is lost and symptoms appear. In our experience we have very demonstrated and supported bibliographically that the symptoms valued in this process are histaminic, although any of them can be caused by another cause.
What is a non-allergic food histaminosis (HANA)?
Well, it is an excess of histamine in the tissues caused by eating moderately foods that behave in the patient as histamine-releasers and this does not depend on the food, but on the patient. All foods contain histamine to a greater or lesser extent, but this is not the cause of the disease. The same food can be tolerated by some people and not by others regardless of the histamine content.
Are there foods that should be prohibited from the outset in these processes?
In principle no, and we do not think it is correct to empirically remove foods because if there is no total improvement then we start having to diagnose with manipulated diets and this can initially complicate the process. In its day we reported that in these processes milk was present in ninety-two percent of the patients, but only milk as the only responsible only occurred in less than one percent of the patients. This was really murmured back in 1985 but time has proven us right and now they have gone on to demonize dairy products by withdrawing them without criteria, this practice does not seem adequate to us.
Is the diet of histamine-releasing foods the only treatment?
The only effective treatment is to avoid histamine releases, if this is released by a food then you have to remove the food and if it is by three foods then you have to remove the three foods because the chronic disease is caused by food, however there are other factors such as stress that are also releasing histamine and although they are not responsible for the chronic disease, they can occasionally hinder the evolution.
The management of a patient affected by non-allergic food histaminosis is very laborious, both for the physician and for the patient as well as for the diagnostic laboratory. The patient is generally affected by many symptoms, has gone through several specialties and has used several symptomatic remedies with a lot of drug consumption that generally have had a limited performance, therefore, the doctor’s work has to be very informative and slow because at the end of the process the patient has to make the sacrifice of a diet and for that he has to be very convinced.
Our procedure of attention contemplates all these points and when things are done well, in our experience, approximately ninety-six percent of the patients evolve favorably and what is also important, after thirty-four years the 3-4% of non-evolution we also know the causes.