Isadora
Member
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2013
- Messages
- 213
This excellent article called "Freshness Counts" by Georgia Ede MD, enlightened me about many aspects of Peat's described diet and what seemed to me his sometimes hard to comprehend avoidance of certain foods or manners of preparing them. It also provided multiple precious indications that I was minding too little what seemed to me like personal preferences of Dr. Peat's. There was solid science behind his avoidance of aged meat and fermented foods -- that of the histamines.
Don't let yourself be deterred from reading it because the author is now in her ketogenic phase -- I am sure she will grow out of it, hopefully without too much damage. Or else, we are all wrong here and we should go back to our proverbial "caves"...:)
Now, this is someone I would love to see discuss Raymond Peat's views!
Don't let yourself be deterred from reading it because the author is now in her ketogenic phase -- I am sure she will grow out of it, hopefully without too much damage. Or else, we are all wrong here and we should go back to our proverbial "caves"...:)
Now, this is someone I would love to see discuss Raymond Peat's views!
Dr. Ede said:Here is a list of the most common biogenic amines and the amino acids they are made from. You’ll notice that a couple of them have ghastly names, worthy of a Vincent Price voiceover: putrescine and the perfectly ghoulish cadaverine—mwaaah ah ah…
Parent amino acids are in green and their biogenic amine products are in red:
Arginine—Agmatine, Putrescine, Spermine, Spermidine
Histidine—Histamine
Lysine—Cadaverine
Ornithine—Putrescine, Spermine, Spermidine
Phenylalanine—Phenylethylamine
Tryptophan—Tryptamine, Serotonin
Tyrosine–Tyramine
To turn a garden variety amino acid into a powerful biogenic amine, you need to remove its carboxyl group. To accomplish this you need a special enzyme called a decarboxylase (fancy word for “enzyme that chops off carboxyl groups”).
Many species of bacteria and yeast contain the enzyme histidine decarboxylase (HDC), which turns histidine into histamine. So, when meat (or fish) is not immediately consumed or frozen, bacteria get straight to work breaking down the amino acids within it, and one of the by-products is histamine.
So, take-home lesson: eat your meat/fish either very fresh or confirm that it was frozen quickly. Seems simple enough, right? But wait, there’s more. We silly humans actually go out of our way to ferment foods on purpose. People like to play with food—we add bacteria to milk to make cheese and yogurt. We add yeast to grapes to make wine. We add bacteria to meat to make salami. In the process, these fresh foods—milk, grapes, and meat—which in their fresh forms are essentially histamine-free, become very high in histamine and other biogenic amines.