Understanding Multiple Food Intolerances: Histamine, Oxalates, Sulfur and More!

In this episode of The Histamine Well, Joanne breaks down the complexities of multiple food intolerances.

She explains how SIBO and oxalates can drive up histamine, leading to oxalate, histamine, and FODMAP intolerances.

Oxalates also deplete sulfur. This can cause an overgrowth of sulfur-producing bacteria in the gut, triggering sulfur intolerance. A lack of sulfur can also contribute to salicylate intolerance.

Joanne explores the link between nervous system dysfunction and food intolerances, showing how they are deeply connected.

She also shares how to prioritize which intolerances to address first. Plus, she covers the importance of testing to uncover the root causes.

Tune in to learn more!

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Transcript

Joanne Kennedy: 0:00

Hi, it's Joanne. In this episode, I hope to shed some light onto what might be going on with your multiple food intolerances. We'll explore how issues like oxalates, histamine, sulfur, and even mold, can disrupt the gut and make it harder for you to tolerate certain foods, especially plant-based foods. If you're experiencing sensitivity to oxalate, salicylate, sulfur, FODMAPs, or even animal proteins, this episode is for you. Welcome to the Histamine Well Podcast designed for practitioners and patients alike. This is your trusted source for insights on histamine intolerance, methylation, gut health, women's hormones, and much more. I'm Joanne Kennedy. Your host, naturopath, author, and educator. Passionate about breaking down complex science into clear, accessible knowledge. Whether you are a health professional or navigating your personal wellness journey, the Histamine Well Podcast bridges the gap between cutting edge research and practical understanding to empower you with the tools to thrive. Hi everyone and welcome back to the show. Now, when I was preparing for this episode, I thought this is going to take me a long, long time because there really is so much to say about multiple food intolerances. But I stopped myself and I thought, who are the people that desperately need the answers. Answers, and it's people suffering with multiple food intolerances. So this episode isn't necessarily an educational episode for practitioners and students like my other ones. Certainly practitioners and students, you can listen, and if you are interested in multiple food intolerances, getting my take on it. But it's for those suffering as I wanna top line it so that you don't get too confused and overwhelmed and go down rabbit holes.'cause with multiple food intolerances can drive you crazy. There are so many crossovers with different foods. Some foods are-- they're high oxalate, but they're high histamine. Or, but are they high in sulfur but they're high in fodmap. But they're high in salicylates. So there's so many crossovers. And when you are looking at lists, you can go crazy trying to work out what can I have, what can I have? So we just need to understand the major drivers and we need to go in and fix the major drivers.'cause just trying to fix a sulfur problem or a FODMAP problem, or a salicylate problem, or a histamine problem, it gets very difficult. So we need to understand root causes and do some testing around these root causes and understand what's going on with the gut microbiome and the biochemistry and the knock-on effect that has with this chain of events that happen when you get multiple food intolerances. I first actually have to start with what I'm seeing clinically and my colleague Melanie as well, is that nervous system dysfunction is actually a major driver of multiple food intolerances. It does it in many ways. More ways than I actually understand is this is something that is new to me. Well not new, but it's something I'm more focused in on. And the nervous system is simply in hyper vigilant. When it's hypervigilant, it freaks out the immune system. It's called psycho neuroimmunology. There's a whole field of research in this. How the nervous system impacts the immune system, but essentially it's a warning sign. So the nervous system is giving you warning signs. It helps keep you alive. The immune system helps keep you alive as well. So when these kind of get together, they become hypervigilant and they freak out. They do. They literally freak out at anything that you put in your mouth. Very simply, when there's nervous system dysfunction, you are in fight and flight. You're not in rest and digest, so you might not be producing adequate digestive enzymes. It also causes dysbiosis, which is an imbalance between good and bad bacteria. As you'll learn in this episode, that can also contribute to multiple food intolerances. Now if you have identified that trauma is an issue. The interesting thing with trauma, we often think trauma as being a very severe thing. Like a childhood trauma. Or some traumatic event that happens in your life like a divorce or loss of a job, loss of a child. But it can be things like. Having a car accident that's just not that serious, but it jars your nervous system. It's quite nerve wracking. It can be having surgery. It can be emotional distress. It can be chemical stress. So you can be exposed to a lot of toxins and chemicals and it's causing a lot of toxicity in your body which causes nervous system dysfunction. So it's a trauma to the body. Having viruses, a viral load can be a trauma to the body. So if you're interested in this work, I highly recommend Irene Lyon, LYON, and her work on nervous system dysfunction. Melanie and I are sending so many patients to her online programs because it's helping really get to the root cause of why the immune system is so hyper reactive to foods. What we also need to understand is that multiple food intolerances can often stem from a disruption in the microbiome. So the microbiome is basically your gut bacteria. There are trillions of bacteria in our gut. Way more than cells in our body, and they have a profound impact on human health. They have many benefits including the digestion of food. They protect the gut. They're a really important part of the immune system. So there's so many benefits, way more than what I'm gonna go into today. But what can happen is you can get too much bad bacteria in the gut and a depletion of your good bacteria. It's called dysbiosis. And this is a starting point for how multiple food intolerances can occur. So one of the things we see commonly is that people are consuming diets that are very high in oxalate. This is why often they're juicing spinach in smoothies and juices. Super high oxalate. They're swapping out their morning lattes with milk to almond milk. Super high in oxalate. They're going grain free, and they're having almond meal and almond flour with everything. They're juicing celery super high in oxalate. And what happens when we consume oxalates? We need a healthy gut microbiome to break down those oxalates. And because us humans lack enzymes to break down oxalate, we need healthy microbiome to do it. And what can happen is simply when you consume a lot of these oxalate foods, it's using up a lot of these beneficial bacteria to break down the oxalate. So you can have low levels of oxalate degrading bacteria, or you can just be really having way too many oxalate foods and it's depleting this bacteria. So what oxalates are is they form sharp little crystals like shards, and they wreak absolute havoc in the gut. They cause a lot of pain, a lot of inflammation. They will drive up histamine in a really big way because they're so inflammatory. They definitely get into the bloodstream driving up histamine systemically that will get into the bladder. Driving up a lot of histamine issues in the bladder. A lot of bladder pain. Frequent urination. And so you now are having issues with oxalate foods and histamine foods. They are a major driver of high histamine. So here we have it. Intolerant to oxalate foods, intolerant to histamine foods. Oxalates can deplete the body of sulfur. And sulfur is extremely important for health. It's actually the second most abundant element in the body, so we really need it. It helps make glutathione, which is one of your body's major antioxidant. It helps make the mucus layer in the gut. It's called mucin. It's a protective coating in the gut. It's a huge part of your immune system. And disruptions in that definitely contribute to food intolerances. The interesting thing with this is that because sulfur is so important, the gut microbiome can increase the production of sulfur producing bacteria. If you are curious to learn more about oxalate toxicity and its impact on histamine and methylation, I've got a 45 minute webinar covering exactly what oxalates are, why they accumulate their symptoms, how they deplete sulfur lowering Homocysteine. Plus I'll share safe strategies for removing oxalates from the body. This is a must know for practitioners, students, and anyone suffering with oxalate issues. You can find the webinar at joannekennedynaturopathy.com. Just go to shop webinars and you can use the discount code OXALATES to enjoy 20% off. And so when you consume sulfur foods, you already have too much sulfur in your gut. Therefore, you are not actually tolerating these sulfur rich foods. And this is a problem as sulfur is used in one of the liver detoxification pathways called sulfation, and that is partly how you detoxify and break down salicylates. So here we have it. Your intolerant oxalate foods, histamine foods, sulfur foods, salicylate foods. So you can see how dysbiosis can cause absolute havoc with these multiple food intolerances. We can layer if you have sibo. You are also going to be intolerant to foods that are high in FODMAP and also high in resistant starch. Both FODMAPs and resistant starch feeding SIBO will drive up histamine. So here we have intolerance to so many plant foods, and this is why it becomes really confusing for people as they're eating well, but getting sicker and sicker and sicker. And I see this a lot in clinic with my patients and it's extremely stressful. This will drive up health anxiety. When you are anxious, your nervous system's taxed. It causes more dysbiosis. It depletes your digestive enzymes particularly hydrochloric acid. And without hydrochloric acid, it's very hard for you to break down your animal protein, particularly red meat. Then you become intolerant to animal protein, particularly red meat. So where do we start? Okay. Oh, sorry. I need to mentioned mold. So mold also is a major disruptor of the microbiome and a lot of mold species also contain oxalate. There are other disruptors to the microbiome, as I said, stress, antibiotics, or a major disruptor as with many medications. Also taking herbal medicine for too long can disrupt the microbiome. And definitely common herbicides and pesticides are going to disrupt the microbiome. These are very, very common things that we see in our patients every day. So it's very common to have a disrupted microbiome. So what do we need to know about testing? If you suspect you have an oxalate issue now, the classic symptoms of oxalate aside from all these food intolerances are pain symptoms. Gut pain, joint pain, bladder pain. Plus any histamine symptom. Doing an organic acids test can help you identify if you have a problem with oxalate. If you had have known mold exposure, then you should also be testing for oxalates. You can do a stool test, a complete microbiome mapping test to look for the overall health of your microbiome. It will also pick up if you have low levels of oxalobacter formigenes, which is a type of bacteria that breaks down oxalate. It's not the only one, but it's the one that takes on the brunt of breaking down oxalates. It will also show you if you have high sulfur producing bacteria. If you are getting a lot of upper bloating and belching and flatulence, a major sign of sibo. If you really are not tolerating FODMAP foods or resistant starch, classic one. What's high in FODMAPs and resistant starch is legume. So chickpeas and lentils and beans. If they're really problematic for you then SIBO is a major red flag. And also if you have low iron is a really big red flag for sibo. So testing, we've got complete microbiome mapping to look for sulfur and to look for what's going on with your microbiome. It can also look for digestive enzyme markers. It can show you that you've got low hydrochloric acid. Test for sibo. You need to know if you've got sibo,'cause you'll have big issues with FODMAP starch and histamine. Organic acids testing for for oxalate. The organic acid test also, so shows some of the mold markers as well. So what's the priority? So it gets very hard when you've got all of these things going on. In my mind, the priority is going to be nervous system. Because you know, it's chicken and egg. When you have all of these multiple food intolerances is it is very stressful. It taxes the immune system and it taxes the nervous system. Mold disrupts the nervous system. It actually can damage the nervous system. Histamine drives up adrenaline. There's many reasons. So I would be definitely tackling the nervous system side of things. And as I said, Irene Lyon's course is giving us amazing results in our clinical practice. I'm talking about her all the time. You can actually find a link to her website on my in the show notes for this episode. I highly, highly recommend you do it. And if you do have an oxalate and or mold problem, that usually is where you start above SIBO. Why? Because it's usually driving such chronic inflammation in your gut and really, really causing huge issues with histamine. Even more than SIBO can. And it's also depleting the sulfur, so it's very hard for you to make your digestive enzymes. Make the mucin in your gut. Make your glutathione to get on top of all of these all of this chronic inflammation. Mold can disrupt bile flow and disrupted bile flow is a major cause of SIBO. So we can see that oxalates and mold are going to be like the priorities on where to start with. Guys, I know this is just a short episode, but I just wanted to top line everything. So this is where you need to start with these multiple food intolerances. I'll put links to the different testing you can do on the show notes. But I hope this episode has given you some insight on where to start to dive deeper as diving deeper into what's possibly causing your multiple food intolerances so that you can get on top of them. So thank you for joining me. I hope you found this episode beneficial. Be sure to subscribe to the histamine well so you don't miss an episode. Leave a review and you can also share this episode with someone who could benefit. If you have any questions you'd like answered or have a topic you'd like me to discuss, please go to my website, joanne kennedy naturopathy.com, where you can provide us with that information. Until next time, take care and be well.