I will preface this by saying I am not a medical professional, but I am a qualified health journalist, and auDHD’er who has spent years researching possible connections between gut health, autism, skin health and so on. I try to join up the dots that western medicine often fails to, looking into the why and how health problems occur rather than just providing a cream that (in the case of steroids and antibiotics) treats the symptoms but can often leave you sicker and more prone to the problem further down the line.
My very short video this morning, made while I was having a bath (!), focuses on histamine intolerance and poses the question, could it be linked to my recent psoriasis diagnosis? Please watch it for a quick intro to these conditions. It is understood the autism and adha have linked to autoimmune and connective tissue disorders, but whether or not these pesky genes (perhaps from our Neanderthal forefathers) will be expressed is perhaps a matter of luck – and, increasingly judgement – inflammation is at the root cause of all these issues.
Essentially psoriasis is an incurable auto immune disorder that causes itchy and scaly skin as well as joint and other problems. I have been chasing this diagnosis for over a decade and in the meantime, have learned a lot about the links between gut health, immunity and its whole body impact on well being.
So where do I start? Well, I think you start out at birth. We all know that immunity starts at birth and with the growing number of childhood allergies, where increasing numbers of people suffer from life threatening allergic responses to everyday things, we know there is something weird about modern childhood environments and practices that is driving this.
From C-sections, formula milk, nurseries, anti-microbials, processed food and anti-biotics, (and yes, even vaccines, but this is a debate I don’t wish to wade into) modern childhoods are far from natural, and I believe that is is the layer upon layer of these unnatural childhood experiences that primes our immune system to be overreactive. I myself had a natural (if, early, childbirth – thanks, Ma, for having the doc get me out a few days before I was ready back in the 80s dark ages when they would do what the mother wanted rather than what the baby was telling them.)
I was formula fed – a mix of cow, goats and soy (now banned for infants because of it’s oestrogenic effects in the body) soy milk formula. Unlike my sister, I didn’t suffer from grass allergies or sensitive skin, hay fever or any food allergies, but was brought up by a childminder and given pints of cow milk in the days when it was free before Maggie ‘milk thief’ and UK PM of the era Thatcher discontinued the perk.
So where do I start? Well, I think you start out at birth. We all know that immunity starts at birth and with the growing number of childhood allergies, where increasing numbers of people suffer from life-threatening allergic responses to everyday things, we know there is something weird about modern childhood environments and practices that is driving this.
So far, so normal for the age. I also spent my summers on a farm, which likely helped my immune system – exposure to common germs and potential germs and allergens, like hay, in early childhood helps build a normal immune system – so my dad likely did me a favour going down to feed the goats who were providing my baby milk on the farm in my early youth.
I also suffered a degree of childhood trauma, when my mum left me as a toddler. It is known that cortisol in young children primes the brain for emergencies, the body for threats, hastens puberty and generally cuts childhood short. I went into puberty young and the resulting acne was treated by multiple rounds of antibiotics and Roaccutane in my teens and early twenties.
This is where I believe the real damage was done. I was still taking anti-biotics when my son Jonah was conceived, and though I stopped as soon as I knew I was pregnant, I was, unbeknowst to me, suffering from a fairly systemic yeast infection (some of which he would have swallowed on his way out on his own natural childbirth, which, as I have outlined in other blogs, had an impact on his wellbeing an autism presentation.
It wasn’t until after Ava was born (also diagnosed with autism) that I went on an anti candida diet, shed two stone, and sorted out a fair few health problems. But my skin problems remained until I did a gaps diet a few years later and worked to heal my gut with chicken stock and probiotic foods (a diet that is also thought to help behavioural and mental health problems in conditions like autism.
It stands to reason – inflammation is at the root cause of a lot of health problems, especially auto immune issues, where the body starts mistaking itself for the enemy. It also stands to reason that weird modern childhoods create problem that drive inflammation by screwing up the biome that our body has historically relied upon to regulate itself.
Reprobate Mum
Fast forward another twenty years, and I’m well into perimenopause. I’ve had an inordinately stressful few years, with work problems, financial and health problems. And then my step mother fell ill with what appeared to be a fatal – and frankly terrifying – throwback to another government health scandal, BSE. It’s no surprise my body has begun to overreact – especially now I have been diagnosed with Psoriasis – a condition already linked to stress, medication, diet – western lifestyles, basically – all driven by an overactive immune system primed for threats.
So, where does histamine intolerance come in? Histamine is the chemical your body produces in response to threats. Your body produces more of it when certain enzymes, such as DAO, produced in the gut, are missing from the body. What causes this enzyme not to be produced is anyone’s guess (weird western lifestyles would be mine!), and certain things like menopause, oestrogen levels and gut inflammation can make an intolerance more likely – so random reactions to stuff that normally would not bother most people.
To help your body calm down, you basically have to avoid histamine producing foods – there’s a long list here, which can be tricky as a lot of the histamine producing foods are ones included in the GAPS diet list.
Histamine, after all, is supposed to heal you, but when your body’s ecosystem has gone haywire, it ends up being the enemy (and my concession to the ‘vaccine causes autism debate’ – still raging dangerously years after it was debunked (not unlike a rogue virus itself!)- is that in an already haywire body ecosystem, and ‘weird childhood environments’ can create this, vaccines could cause more inflammation (and potentially damage, therefore) to children, particularly those presenting with autism, that already have inflammatory markers – remember that gobfull of yeast my son swallowed when he was born? – the ones that ferment with sugar and make him act drunk? Yeah, those!
So what to do, given I currently have whole body rashes that tingle and flare every time my blood pressure so much as raises, or I eat avo on toast, like I did yesterday?
Well, it’s back-to-basics for me. A chicken stock fast will help. I know this. There’s a reason chicken broth is dolled out to the sick, and the sick lose their appetites, and that’s because this heals the gut and helps the immune system deal with one problem at a time, rather than having to deal with the conveyor belt of culinary threats coming down the shaft.
Probiotics will help, but only when I’m sufficiently healed that it doesn’t just trigger more histamine to be released from the gut. In the meantime, quercetin, – a natural anti-histamine (I am suspicious that western medicine builds up problems for the future in most healthy people) and expensive DAO enzymes will help stem the tide of histamine that has taken over my body. It’s impossible to simple ‘avoid stress’ or histamine producing foods. I need to give my body a complete break from defending itself against potential threats, to calm down my nervous system and reset my gut, where so much of the immune system resides.
Wish me luck. It’s not easy battling a whole lifestyle environment that doesn’t support people to make better choices for their body’s wellbeing. It’s almost like we are set up to fail.
I don’t wish to fall into a conspiracy mindset – especially when I was SO wrong about my step mother – she had a UTI and that can make older people go totally mad – and at that age, the human body is like a house of cards – when one thing gets broken, a succession of others quickly follows.
What I’m advocating for is the house of cards be built more strongly and rationally in childhood, sticking to a more natural environment and practices so that we don’t come unstuck, as more and more of us seem to be, in middle age – as the recent succession of bowel cancers in younger people is demonstrating. The fact there is an anti-healthcare movement gathering force at all is because people know in their guts that something is not right with healthcare right now and that’s because it does seem to lead to as many problems over the long term as it solves in the short.
This is how it started. It’s now *everywhere* across my body 😦
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