Histamines: Why Peat Avoids Many Foods

[charlie]

Welcome to the forum Dr. Ede.

Really looking forward to your input here. I do hope you get a chance to look into Ray Peats work. :)

 

[jnhermann]

Hi Isadora and everyone else--

Joe Paleo sent me a tweet earlier today letting me know about this nice thread, so I thought it I would pop over and say hello. Thank you for the interest in the histamine article--it is perfectly ok with me if you post excerpts here--the great thing about the internet is once you post something, it becomes public and people get to share it and toss it about to think it all over. I am not familiar with Ray Peat's work and have an unusually busy stretch coming up the next few days because of work and Easter weekend traveling, but if anyone has questions or if there is something you'd like me to ponder with you, I'm happy to do it once I'm back in town on Monday!

Have a nice weekend!

Great to have you on here. You should definitely read Ray Peat's articles. There is a lot of amazing stuff to learn! You will love it. http://www.RayPeat.com

 

[Isadora]

Hi Isadora and everyone else--

Joe Paleo sent me a tweet earlier today letting me know about this nice thread, so I thought it I would pop over and say hello.

Hello, Dr. Ede! (and Joe Paleo!)

By now, I have read your keto-adventures and I think you did everyone in the Paleo sphere a world of good with your ketogenic experiment! That should be required reading for all those jumping on the paleo/low carb diet!

As your pulse was decreasing, day by day almost, I was telling myself, oh, no, her thyroid! She should stop this! And I was so relieved to see that you actually did. Many of us here are former low carbers/paleo/primal/ketogenic diet adepts who didn't know how to read the signals our bodies were sending us, thus heading into hypothyroidism, which we are now trying to fix with a Peat style diet.

Seeing how you feel about carbs, I think reading Dr. Peat's articles might ring an instinctive bell. If you do read him, please let us know what you think, here or on your blog. I saw that you were planning a post on hypothyroidism, anyway. You may want to check out Dr. Cate Shanahan's post about it -- "Going Low-Carb Too Fast May Trigger Low Thyroid and Hormonal Imbalances". Now, if only her book would have mentioned this! Nobody does!

At some point in your ketogenic diet, Day 25, you write:

Mid-morning Notes: Two hours after eating a breakfast of chicken and duckfat (21 grams of protein + 29 grams of fat for a total of 374 calories), I still felt a bit lightheaded and cold and fuzzy-headed. I went to the supermarket (I am lucky to live right next door to a Whole Foods), and strolled through the aisles while waiting for the butcher to carve me up some beef fat (how weird), but nothing looked appealing. I was not hungry, but I felt I needed more nutrition.
(...)
In the afternoon and evening I found myself distracted by thoughts of food–dancing through my head were images of chocolate cupcakes, giant balls of fresh mozzarella cheese, grilled burgers, and all kinds of yummy things. I was getting mouth-watering hankerings for…well…just about anything. I told myself that if I don’t eat dairy tomorrow, I should be free of these intrusive, delectable daydreams.

On this diet, we stuff ourselves with fruit-originated carbs (or even sugar) and ruminant meat and dairy and coffee and very soon we don't crave them anymore. We try to increase metabolism... We don't eat vegetable oils, grains and most vegetables. Those who don't want to put on weight and are no longer very young have to count calories. And we play around with a series of supplements in our quest to optimize metabolism. Maybe some of the elders here could point you to a summary of the Peat method, if you are interested. (You know you are. Ice cream is a staple... )

Thank you for your wonderful blog and for stopping by! We'll come visit often, too!

 

[gretchen]

Very interesting: more evidence against yogurt and wine. I thawed some meat yesterday and it wasn't as red as I thought it should be; hmmm.

I heard about polyamines for years while on the blood type diet. It was the reason for avoiding oranges:
http://www.drpeterjdadamo.com/wiki/wiki.pl/Polyamines

I had recently wondered about tyrosine but I guess that is out as well. There was a popular book in the 2000s called The Diet Cure which promoted the use of amino acids like tyrosine. Amazing how far the serotonin thing has gone:
http://www.dietcure.com/aminoacids.html

 

[BingDing]

Want to put this somewhere before I forget about it. I just found White Oak Pastures which has clean, grass finished beef and they don't dry age it.

From the faqs:

Is your beef dry-aged ?

No. Dry-aging serves two purposes:

It is controlled tissue breakdown that helps to make steaks more tender.
It allows moisture to intensify the flavor of the beef.

We choose to not dry-age our grass-fed beef. After a great deal of experimentation in our own abattoir, we have chosen to ship our beef as freshly as possible for the following reasons:

The controlled tissue breakdown can serve to make steaks more tender, but in doing so, it makes the ground beef and the roasts more mushy. The same breakdown that is going on in the steaks is going on in these cuts as well. We feel that our steaks are adequately tender, and we don’t like mushy ground beef. Our steaks can be better aged in your refrigerator, if you feel it necessary to make them more tender.
The flavor of our beef does not need to be intensified through moisture loss. It naturally has a wonderful clean terra noir that our customers say is addictive. The fresh flavor of our beef is one of its greatest attributes. We will not fool around with this.

They ship to the lower 48. Might make economic sense if you have a chest freezer.

 

[charlie]

Yeh my local cow farmer is so proud of their dry aging.

Great find BingDing!

 

[pboy]

cadaverine sounds terrible...so does putrescene. It makes it even worse that they are associated with yeast infections. According to wiki, they are both toxic to humans

 

[BingDing]

Thanks, Charlie. I scoured the eat wild directory for my area and that was the only one I found.

I'm still looking for a pig farmer that Ray would approve of; man, I miss ham and bacon.

 

[charlie]

Might have to get your own pigs and feed them coconuts and fruit.

 

[CellularIconoclast]

Has anyone seen any good table (with cited sources) listing histamine contents of various foods? This article is helpful but doesn't mention very many.

 

[David]

Another possible alternative for grass-fed non-aged beef, including liver and oxtail and knuckle bones for gelatin, could be found here: http://www.americangrassfedbeef.com/

Although it says on their site that they dry-age their beef and you need to make a special order to get non-aged beef, I e-mailed them asking how I could order non-aged beef and this was their answer:

"We used to dry age our beef, but stopped due to the time and space required. We thought we’d taken all claims of dry aging off the site, but it looks like we missed one. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
Let me know if you need any further help."

They also have pastured pork and chicken, though I'm not sure about them being Ray Peat approved.

 

[freal]

I remember one interview where Ray Peat said that meat that is not fresh is not good (maybe he said its carcinogenic) and that meat in the US is not fresh. Is this related to the biogenic amines?

How fresh is meat sold in Europe and US. I personally buy prepackaged meat, I had really bad experience with those butchers section in supermarkets, only thing I buy there is liver. If acceptable is 5 days in the refrigerator and the supermarket refrigerators and warehouse are at 4°c I dont think they can keep this more than 7 days.

Also something else is bugging me, when I buy turkey or chicken breast, it smells when I open the package but the smell dissipates. Only the liquid left in the container smells, like bacteria only invaded only the outer layer? I cant find a definet answer to why is that. Also I know beef turns brown or purple naturally, when there is no oxygen, but is that normal for pork. Turkey and chicken are very commonly gray in the inside and when you cut it open it turns pink again.

 

[freal]

I just found an article Ray Peat did on this, seems a recent article.

http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/me ... ress.shtml

I also found some analysis of this biogenic amines

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... ble/T0001/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... ure/F0001/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... ble/T0002/

It seems meat is not the only thing filled with those things.