Hi Topaz,
The over/under methylator is a red herring as far as I am concerned. The lists of symptoms detailing these so-called conditions. Every symptom on each list was a b12 and/or folate deficiency symptom and I and most others had roughly equal numbers from both lists and both lists contained "depression". I used lists combined from several sources. I have posted these lists color coded for what deficiency and indicated which ones I had from both lists.
Lack of methylfolate or mb12 will both cause high histamine conditions and much greater allergic and chemical reactivity.
Hi,
I'm new to this site having been trying to get my head around methylation cycle blocks and histamine intolerance for the past few months and having made most of the common mistakes.
What I have learnt from Dr Ben Lynch is that there are 4 key issues in minimising the chance and severity of Methylfolate side effects (the one I'm most concerned about at the moment being histamine overload, per this post).
1) superoxide dismutase (SOD) may need to be taken in the diet or supplemented. I use wheat or barley grass juice powder and it works well.
2) if glutathione is low it may be beneficial to support liposomally. I also did that for a couple of months.
3) electrolytes are very important as methylation increases cell division and more cells mean greater requirements for key minerals.
....And for where I have just made my latest mistake and where I see the relevance to this post....
4) Methionine. Methionine helps the body make SAM-e which is an important co factor in the HNMT enzyme which degrades intra cellular histamine. Dr lynch says that methyl folate depletes methionine over time unless you are either getting enough protein (and digesting/assimilating it - I thought I was but clearly not possibly due to gut issues) or supplementing. Without methionine your SAM-e production can break down and thus your ability to metabolise intra cellular histamine can break down also. The whole machine just struggles then.
I think this is what happened to me lately.
I kept increasing Methylfolate which obviously depleted my methionine (or my gut issues meant I wasn't making it from protein) and my histamine load has slowly increased and went through the roof in the past few days (itching, insomnia, fatigue, depression). Now I have had to supplement directly with SAM-e in order to try get my histamine burden down, and reduce the methyl folate for a while.
Ultimately I would prefer not to supplement SAM-e directly and to make my own SAM-e from methionine but I also understand that issues with the MAT enzyme can make this process less efficient (I understand that MAT uses magnesium as a co factor).
Also right now I don't know how my body will respond to SAM-e but time will tell.
My net point here is that everybody seems to be saying that folate/b12 are needed and ultimately help in the degradation of histamine via improved methylation. I don't think that's disputed but if the pathways are jammed further down stream it would appear that it's only a matter of time before you run into problems whether it's with histamine overload due to depleted methionine/SAM-e or somewhere/something else in the cycle.
Remember re histamine: it seems you need to be effectively making SAM-e or methyl folate will cause you problems so make sure to get enough methionine
For what it's worth I've added B1 to my protocol in the past few days as I understand (from Ben Lynch) that it helps get methyl histamine out of the body. I am not sure how it does this.
Hopefully this helps somebody.