I love this MyChart application that lets you keep track of medical appointments, vaccines, lab results, especially now there’s a new feature where you get to see the communications behind the scenes.
For example, the neurologist saw Gary’s skin and ordered some blood cell tests.
- I looked at the blood cell tests and they looked a little like my brother’s blood before his liver went out.
- Before I could even get worked up about that, bloop, normal liver test results showed up.
- That led me down a B-12 path so deep it made me think, “Maybe there’s something wrong with his folate numbers.”
- Later that evening there was a staff communication that the doctor wanted to add on a folate test.
That test came back normal as I was waiting in the parking lot while Gary was visiting the dermatologist. “All right!” I thought. “Things are happening.”
Gary came out of that appointment with the direction to follow a histamine elimination diet for four weeks. He’s starting Saturday. I’m doing the same so that there will be no in-house temptations. The wasn’t a test from the doctor; Gary’s following some information he got off the internet. I don’t know yet if it’s “eliminate all histamines and slowly add them back” or if it’s “eat normally and slowly eliminate histamines.”
So, in summary, there’s been a lot of action in the battle against Gary’s allergy / B-12 / leprosy issues, but no answers yet. I was really primed for answers.
7 responses to “Gary’s skin: progress?”
At least there’s action, but yes, sigh.
(I assume you know that leftover meat has histamine in it? Weird, weird stuff, but: cook all meat from fresh, single servings.)(unrelatedly, cooked, cooled, and cooked potatoes have their digestible starch content change; still-cold cooked potato has the highest amount of resistant starch [… okay, *raw* actually does, but of the edible potatoes, potato salad is the winner…], reheated is second, fresh-cooked is by far the lowest; same thing for at least some other starches – rice and pasta – but not sure if it generalizes to all starches)(histamines don’t care beans about resistant starch as far as I’m aware, but it’s another “… wait, what?” food molecular changes Thing upon, not just cooking, but cooling after cooking, that I find fascinating)
KC – I had no idea about leftovers! That’s how I operate: make food for the week on Sunday. What about made fresh and immediately frozen?
… hm. It looks like that is *mostly* a Natural Foods Community conclusion rather than a Journal Articles Conclusion, *but* also research is waaaay behind on histamines et al (a bunch of this stuff was supposed to “not be science, women are just imagining it” and then aged cheese and wine were implicated, and now finally the science is getting closer to catching up, but exactly *what* in the mix will in fact turn out to be necessary or not: I have no idea)(like ‘old wives’ tales’ of traditional herbal medicine and whatnot, where some things have been rediscovered as actually-effective cures and then other things… no, that doesn’t work at all; presumably it’ll be a mix with histamine diets as well?). I do have a friend with mast cell issues who does better with freshly cooked chicken than with leftover, which she is also super-frustrated by because yes, batch cooking is magic!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8469513/#sec7-nutrients-13-03207 is the most recent journal article histamine advice list I can find, but doesn’t say anything about frozen, sigh. Maybe poaching a piece of chicken each night and feeding him a lot of salads-with-chicken-on-top would work as a test case? (apparently boiling results in lower histamine content than grilling or I’d suggest a George Foreman Grill as the easy way out)
There’s also these articles (“histamine application matters a lot but we can’t reproduce the exact same symptom set and onset time in the same individuals, even though the placebo vs. histamine+DAO vs. histamine results are statistically significant” and “huh, diet recommendations vary a lot; some things are because of histamine itself but others appear to affect how histamine is processed” and “huh, cooking method also matters”, not in that order):
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5705351/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21165702/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8143338/
Sorry it’s a giant mess (I have a similarly inadequately-medically-defined food avoidance need and it is a PAIN to figure out what is safe to eat and sometimes it’s just trial and error) *but* also articles definitely indicate that malfunctioning histamine response can cause major skin issues and bowel issues, so there is actually a chance of this clearing up a chunk for Gary. Now, whether he’ll be willing to eat boiled meat over a low-histamine salad or something for a week, to see if it has an effect, or not: I don’t know…
Also there is now potentially some form of DAO supplementation, which might help improve the margin of histamine-diet error?
KC – We are looking into one of those meal prep plans. I hope I might be able to pick things up daily. And I’ve purchased a few low histamine cookbooks.
Good luck! Hope it goes really well and hope that it turns out to be the answer to So Much That It’s Totally Worth It *and* that it turns out he mostly needs to dodge the big ticket things but can still have leftovers. (which is the case for some people!)
But it’ll be a pain in the interim. Make sure he keeps a good food diary and good symptom diary!!!
(okay. Realistically. You can’t make Gary do anything. But I hope he does keep good records so that it’s easier to eventually suss out which things turn out to matter for his situation vs. not.)
KC – Me too. We’ll see in short order.