Pathologies as different as headaches, migraine, chronic fatigue, diarrhea or constipation, ptyalism, contractures, dehydration of the intervertebral discs or tinnitus can be caused by food. This means that a therapeutic diet can sometimes be a good alternative to taking drugs to alleviate symptoms.
The aphorism that Hippocrates, the father of medicine, bequeathed 2,400 years ago is: “Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food”. Although his disciples seem to have forgotten it and Nutrition is hardly studied in the Faculty of Medicine, little by little this truth is making its way into the medical community.
How to detect non-allergic reactions produced by food?
If a food causes the patient to develop an allergic reaction, it is easy to detect which protein is responsible and it should be eliminated from the diet. However, there are a series of problems derived from silent reactions that appear as a consequence of mechanisms other than allergic ones. These release histamine and cause progressive deterioration of health, gradually invalidating the patient.
This is known as Non-Allergic Food Histaminosis or HANA Syndrome. That is to say, it is a silent reaction to some foods that ends up causing non-alarming effects but that gradually reduce the patient’s quality of life. Its knowledge can help the improvement or recovery of multiple pathologies that today cannot be properly addressed.
In the HANA Syndrome a series of symptoms accumulate that can be treated from different specialties. The patient usually goes to the specialist in clinical analysis to solve the symptom that worries him the most, but the study of Dr. López Elorza’s team invites to look for new coordinates to study the disease in its totality, without limiting it to only one symptom. Knowing exactly which foods cause it is more complicated.
Food histaminosis: a multidisciplinary approach
The studies performed in Dr. López Elorza’s laboratory are requested by specialists from multiple specialties. Between 30-40% of patients are referred by Internal Medicine professionals and are usually patients with fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue. Another 20-25% of patients are referred by Traumatology specialists for intervertebral dehydration. Between 10 and 12% are due to digestive problems. To a lesser extent, these are patients with psychiatric, dermatological, neurological or hepatic problems, among others.
Pediatrics is also another specialty that requires clinical analysis, but in a different and more specific way.
What are the symptoms of non-allergic food histaminosis?
The symptoms suffered by patients with non-allergic food histaminosis are multiple: diarrhea, migraines or headaches, abdominal swelling after eating, dysregulation of secretions (vaginal discharge, tears or saliva), cramps in the muscles, etc. All of these can be direct symptoms. In addition, there are other symptoms due to indirect actions, such as feeling pressure pain, constipation, dry skin or intervertebral dehydration, among others. Other typical symptoms are chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia.
The last symptom added to the list was tinnitus, after a study of more than 30 patients. It was found that, in 80% of the cases, the cause was of food origin because, by following an exclusion diet, they improved.
It has also been studied that some autoimmune pathologies improve with exclusion diets. Some examples are autoimmune plateletopenias and autoimmune hypertransaminasemia of the infant (related to milk protein). In autoimmune diseases there may be an underlying HANA syndrome.
What symptoms in dietary histaminosis make dietary management necessary?
Although there are major and minor symptoms, dysregulation of secretions is indicative of food histaminosis. The same is true for diarrhea, constipation, headaches or migraines. However, the clearest symptom of HANA syndrome is the pressure pain-dry skin-vertebral dehydration axis.
Furthermore, after three studies carried out by Dr. López Elorza, between 80-90% of migraines are caused by milk proteins. Many people who stopped drinking milk explain that they noticed an improvement. However, this should always be supervised by a specialist. In addition, migraine patients also report other symptoms: 70% drool at night, more than 50% have tinnitus and almost 100% have a swollen belly when eating.
Linking obesity and food intolerance is not very precise. Obesity has many causes and it is important to know in detail the history of the patient to know what has caused it, correcting possible errors. However, when obesity is associated with pain on pressure, dry skin and constipation or diarrhea, the patient feels bloated and the weight gain does not correspond to the amount of food eaten, a high percentage has been shown to reduce weight and volume when foods that trigger histamine release are suppressed.