Critterina
Senior Member
- Messages
- 1,238
- Location
- Arizona, USA
Hi Nila,
I'm back online at last...
I think that the fact that one can develop histamine intolerance where the reaction is only to dietary histamines presents a strong case for the role of gut bacteria in food intolerances.
I was born with homozygous SNPs of the DAO gene, but I easily tolerated tomatoes and spinach, as well as most other "textbook" diamines. (Textbook is in quotes because no two lists of histamine foods are the same.) I lost the ability to tolerate them after a respiratory infection that was treated with 5 rounds of antibiotics. The low histamine chef recipes have enough histamine in them to kill me, for example.
So if my own genes can't digest diamines, how did I get by for the first 52 years? My personal belief is that the gut bacteria had working DAO genes. Many gut bacteria have DAO genes, as a search on PubMed will show. Both viral infections (by the heat of fever) and antibiotics are known to kill at least some intestinal bacteria. My theory is that the bugs with good DAO got mostly killed off, so the diamines were not clipped into two monoamines as they had been all my life. Thus they survived and gave me something to be intolerant of, due to lacking gut biota.
Now there is a complicating issue: Both viral infections and antibiotics are also known to contribute to intestinal hyperpermeability (leaky gut). Did I get leaky gut at this time, too? That would allow the undigested diamines and other stuff to go where they don't belong, where the immune system could and should respond. Did this also happen to me? Maybe, maybe not. But to me, the role of gut bugs in food intolerances is a sure thing.
I'm back online at last...
I think that the fact that one can develop histamine intolerance where the reaction is only to dietary histamines presents a strong case for the role of gut bacteria in food intolerances.
I was born with homozygous SNPs of the DAO gene, but I easily tolerated tomatoes and spinach, as well as most other "textbook" diamines. (Textbook is in quotes because no two lists of histamine foods are the same.) I lost the ability to tolerate them after a respiratory infection that was treated with 5 rounds of antibiotics. The low histamine chef recipes have enough histamine in them to kill me, for example.
So if my own genes can't digest diamines, how did I get by for the first 52 years? My personal belief is that the gut bacteria had working DAO genes. Many gut bacteria have DAO genes, as a search on PubMed will show. Both viral infections (by the heat of fever) and antibiotics are known to kill at least some intestinal bacteria. My theory is that the bugs with good DAO got mostly killed off, so the diamines were not clipped into two monoamines as they had been all my life. Thus they survived and gave me something to be intolerant of, due to lacking gut biota.
Now there is a complicating issue: Both viral infections and antibiotics are also known to contribute to intestinal hyperpermeability (leaky gut). Did I get leaky gut at this time, too? That would allow the undigested diamines and other stuff to go where they don't belong, where the immune system could and should respond. Did this also happen to me? Maybe, maybe not. But to me, the role of gut bugs in food intolerances is a sure thing.
