7) Nutritional Treatments (7.1) Food Sensitivity
Description
This article is from the Natural Migraine Cures FAQ, by an588@freenet.carleton.ca (Catherine Woodgold) with numerous contributions by others.
7) Nutritional Treatments (7.1) Food Sensitivity
Many books agree that chocolate is the most likely food to
cause migraines. Other foods which can cause migraines include
avocados, pineapples, beans, peas, lentils, MSG, pork, shrimp,
pickled herring, alcohol, caffeine, cheese, nitrites as preservatives
in hot dogs and other processed meats, and coconut.
One person reports that chamomile or valerian herbal tea
can cause headaches.
The caffeine in chocolate is not the main reason chocolate
causes migraines. There's a group of substances called amines,
common in food, which are the main food trigger of migraines.
There are different amines in different foods. The one in
chocolate is the worst. The one in cheese is called tyramine and
is next worst. Hanington's book [8] describes an experiment in
which it was shown that tyramine can cause migraines. Migraine
people have less monoamine oxidase (MAO), the enzyme in platelets
that breaks down amines.
The amount of tyramine in cheese varies tremendously by type and
even batch of cheese. Milk is OK, since the tyramine is produced
in the cheese-making process by microorganisms. Other amines are
found in other types of food. The reaction to amines is not an
allergy. The amines cause certain hormones to be released in the
body. Different amines may cause migraines in different people.
Nitrites in foods can also cause migraines. Nitrites are
present in some processed meats such as hot dogs, sausages and
lunch meat; the nitrites are added as a preservative.
MSG (monosodium glutamate) may also cause migraines in some people.
A web page [21] describes one person's discovery that it's essential
that food be quite fresh; older foods can cause migraines, apparently.
The bacterial action in the making of cheese is what creates
the tyramine in cheese -- perhaps similar bacterial action
can create migraine-producing chemicals in a variety of foods
such as milk which has been sitting in the refrigerator a few days.
Each person needs to experiment to figure out which foods give
them migraines. This is not always easy to do. A food might not
cause a migraine every time it is eaten; perhaps only when
another cause of migraines happens at the same time.
It's better to go on a very restricted diet for a while, a week
or a month, say, than to experiment by eliminating just one
suspicious food at a time. To illustrate this, suppose you have
a list of 20 suspicious foods, and that by eliminating 5 of them
you can cut your headaches in half, from 10 a month down to 5 ...
but you don't know that, and you don't know which 5 foods are the
bad ones. If you spend 20 months, eating everything except one
food each month, you will learn nothing. You will still have
about 10 headaches a month. Some months you'll have about 9
instead of 10, but that's not enough to notice a difference: you
probably vary from 8 to 12 headaches a month anyway. However, if
you stop eating all 20 foods for a month, you'll notice something
interesting: you'll have only 5 headaches instead of 10. You can
then gradually re-introduce the suspicious foods. Now that you
have fewer headaches, you'll notice it if you have a headache a
few hours after eating a suspicious food. Make sure your
restricted diet contains all the vitamins and other essential
nutrients.
If you combine advice from several books, there will be nothing
left to eat! I recommend the restricted diet suggested by
Brainard [1] as a starting point for experimentation. When I
followed this diet, my migraines diminished significantly, and
over the following weeks, months, and years I gradually tested
and re-introduced to my diet most of the disallowed foods. Some
I went on and off several times to test for subtle effects.
I subjected myself to several bad headaches to be completely
sure I needed to avoid chocolate!
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