#78 Allergies

[00:00:00] Welcome back to episode of the Hormone Hub Podcast, where we talk all things perimenopause, menopause, and have the conversations no one else is having. Sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode. 

Kylie: Hello, hello, and welcome back to The Hormone Hub. I’m your host, Kylie Pinwill, and in today’s episode we’re gonna have a look at the curious link between perimenopause and why for some women, their allergies blow out at this time of life. So I work with clients, all the time who come into the program with headaches, who have, you know, anxiety as a new kind of thing.

Insomnia, brain fog, hives and itchy skin, eczema that they may or may not have had before. An increase in sinus issues and, you know, nasal congestion. And these are just a few of, you know, the symptoms of what [00:01:00] we call mast cell activation or high histamine levels. So histamine symptoms are certainly more common in women than they are in men.

Woohoo, something surprising. And often these high histamine symptoms are tracked with our menstrual cycle. So when we have high estrogen, so when we, hit ovulation, and then again just before our periods, so the two times in our cycle where our estrogen is higher, our histamine symptoms oddly seem to be higher as well.

So there’s, there’s an absolute connection between those mast cells, histamine, and hormones. So how it works is estrogen stimulates our mast cells to release histamine, and at the same time, it kind of blocks our enzymes that clear our histamine. So then, you know, at the same time, histamine stimulates our ovaries to make more estrogen.

So we’ve got our [00:02:00] ovaries, telling our body to make more estrogen histamine. Estrogen making more histamine, histamine, making more estrogen. We get stuck in that vicious cycle. Now, the beauty of progesterone is it comes in, it stabilizes those histamines and those mast cells. It upregulates our enzymes that block our histamine, therefore reducing our overall histamine levels.

So, and what happens during perimenopause, of course, is our progesterone levels drop. So, you know, we don’t have that buffer to, to kind of like block that production of mast cells and you know, we just end up in this crazy cycle. So many of the symptoms, of, you know, high estrogen are also symptoms of histamine and mast cell activation.

For example, in, endometriosis, they’re, they’re really looking into that mast cell activation and the link with endometriosis there. And that’s for a whole other episode.[00:03:00] Other conditions linked to high estrogen like P M S and P M D D as well, which is really interesting. So, you know, certainly, we want to, to kind of have a look at the overall hormone picture and what’s driving it.

Okay, so what is histamine? So, histamine is an immune part of our immune system. It’s a protein that’s, you know, that, that signals, our body. It causes allergies, it causes swelling. Histamine also helps stimulate our stomach acid. It helps stimulate our brain and it plays a really big role in ovulation and reproduction and interestingly, histamine also boosts our libido. Okay? So, you know, and likewise, estrogen boosts libido and antihistamines decrease it. Fun fact. See, I didn’t actually know that until I was researching for today’s episode, but now we all know, right? Okay. So the normal way we regulate histamine is we [00:04:00] naturally, our body makes it, with mast cells and then, you know, naturally our body clears it and it’s a fine balance between histamine in and histamine out.

Okay? So we all make histamines and we all potentially can clear it, but when we are not clearing out that, Histamine, that’s where those allergy symptoms jump in. Okay. And also too, another fun fact is our, when we’re pregnant, the placenta actually makes a large amount of the enzyme that clears our histamines.

So that’s why a lot of women who have always suffered allergies, their symptoms improve over pregnancy. There you go. Fun fact.

Follow me for more tips. Okay, so how do we get too much histamine? So chronic inflammation, okay, will, will stimulate that mast cell activation, alcohol, food sensitivities is a big one. Consuming if we’re sensitive [00:05:00] histamine-containing foods, so things like wine sauerkraut, smoked meats, not having good gut health, can, can definitely trigger, allergies as well.

And. Excess estrogen because estrogen stimulates those mast cells. Okay, so why are we not clearing out our histamines? So definitely some of us naturally don’t produce enough of those clearing enzymes. Gut health, again, you know, our gut’s not working properly, so we’re not clearing those hormones. Vitamin B six is one of our essential co-factors to make those, Histamine clearing enzymes when we have too much, estrogen, when we have too little progesterone.

You know, and also, hormonal birth control because, you know, again, we’re having, we’re on synthetic hormones, so our natural progesterone is low because the synthetic progestins from the birth control are not [00:06:00] enough to clear out that histamine. Okay, so what do we do? What’s the solution? So number one is, food sensitivity test a hundred percent.

So we want to work out what is, what is your body triggered by? Okay. Then we wanna have a look at how can we avoid histamine-stimulating foods. So things like alcohol and, you know, dairies another one. You know, they, they stimulate our body to make more histamines. Then there’s what we call. Histamine-containing foods.

 I would love to invite you to our Nourish and Thrive one-day retreat in the beautiful Noosa coming up on Saturday, the 7th of October. This menopause gut health and pelvic wellness retreat is hosted by myself and also by the beautiful Alex Main. Join us for this transformative one day event, which will give you all of the practical insights [00:07:00] into navigating this perimenopause menopause transition. So you’ll walk away confidently knowing how to nourish your body, optimize your pelvic floor, and core function. Hope to see you there.

Kylie: Okay, so the fastest, simplest way to feel better is to take out these foods and you know, food sensitivities as well, but it becomes a bit restrictive. So what we wanna do is we wanna address those underlying gut issues and those underlying digestive issues so you can improve your to your tolerance of these histamine foods.

So generally, when I do a food sensitivity test with my clients, it identifies the foods that their body’s reacting to. We take those foods out for a period of six months. You know that inflammation goes down, those histamines naturally drop down, and they can ideally reintroduce these foods again. So common histamine-containing foods like red wine, hard, like processed cheese or, you [00:08:00] know, aged cheeses, avocado, soy sauce, deli meat, yeast, bananas. Chocolate is something, you know, a lot of women know that they don’t do well on chocolate. Vinegar and fermented foods, bone broths, things like that. So it can be foods we would otherwise consider to be healthy, but they just adding to your histamine levels right now.

So for most people, histamine’s not a problem. These foods won’t be a problem. So what we wanna do, yeah, so avoid the histamine stimulating foods, reduce our histamine containing foods. We wanna improve our gut health. So we want to, you know, make sure that you are absorbing the nutrients from your food and eliminating properly.

So any bloating, constipation, diarrhea, reflux, you know, we wanna get on top of that. And, you know, get to the bottom of that. Supplement with B 6 if you need to. So certainly [00:09:00] meat, chicken, sunflower seeds are all good sources of B six. We wanna promote the clearance, the healthy clearance of estrogen.

So, this is something I talk about a lot with my clients is, we need to support your liver. So your liver is responsible for clearing histamines. Your liver is responsible for clearing excess estrogen. The more estrogen we clear, the more histamines we’re gonna clear as well. So we want to make sure we’re supporting your liver function.

So, yeah, definitely. This is why, sort of reducing dairy, including B 6, magnesium, supplements or nutrients like cetin can certainly help, in that histamine-clearing process. Vitamin A is gonna help with your, you know, like stomach, losing my words. Okay, we’ll skip vitamin A.

And you know, these are why these can work so well for women’s health. So you don’t have to [00:10:00] suffer through. And if you do want to, you know, have a chat with us, book in a hormone help call, you know, we can certainly talk about, you know, different ways that we can help you reduce the histamine load and, you know, ultimately reduce those allergy symptoms as well.

Because taking an antihistamine, you know, we are just, you’re putting a bandaid on the symptoms. So it will help alleviate those symptoms a hundred percent, but it’s not helping your body clear out those histamines. So those allergies are not ongoing. Okay. So I hope that helps and you know, if anyone has any questions or you want to book in a hormone help call, I will put the link to that in the show notes and we will talk to you in the next episode.

Thank you for taking the time to listen today. You can head on over to the show notes at kyliepinwill.com/podcast where you’ll find all the links. Now, before we go, it would mean the world to me if you’d head on over [00:11:00] to your favorite podcast channel, subscribe, and leave a review. Don’t forget to share it with your friends.

Then stay tuned for next week’s episode and I can’t wait to see you then.