Question:
I’ve found this site really interesting. I think I have a tyramine sensitivity, but I have never met anyone with the exact symptoms as me. After eating something high in Tyramines, I wake up in a confused state from sleeping. I am panicked, my heart is racing and it takes about 5-10 minutes for me to get back to reality. I’ve worked out that figs, aubergines, over ripe bananas, gravy powder are dangerous for me, and I am still learning what else is. It is very frightening waking up in this state. The hard thing is that Tyramine is in so many things, and yet some things don’t effect me, such as red wine. I also have suffered from migranes, but normally they are related to the “time of the month”
Kelly
Joan’s answer:
Dear Kelly
Thank you for sharing your unusual symptoms with other readers. Your symptoms are very unusual and special in a way you may not have thought of. They are probably a very good description of what we call “night terrors” in children, but children cannot describe what is happening to them nearly as well as well as you have done. Parents often say the child cannot be consoled for quite a while.
Your unusual symptoms, if considered separately have been reported by others. Occasionally some adults will tell me they wake up having a panic attack, others report their heart racing. Many report some degree of confusion, or use words like ‘fuzzy thinking’ or ‘brain fog’. Your severe confusion on waking combined with the others, does sound very frightening.
Tyramine and other amines are in many foods. It is important to realize that there are many different types of amines, and that each amine sensitive person can be sensitive to their own particular ones.
And to make it more complicated, people who are sensitive to amines are often sensitive to other chemicals in food, some natural such as tyramine, some as additive colours, flavours, some preservatives, and glutamates. Gravy powders can have some of these as well as the flavours that may have amines derived from the browning of meats.
These other suspect foods do not show up as separate problems but they can add up to “aggravating the underlying condition”. I call them “the layer underneath”.
See the long article on amines, and my book Are You Food Sensitive? to learn how to do diet detective work to manage your diet using all the tricks I have learnt about being able to get away with as many foods as possible.
Your idea of the migraines being related to the “time of the month” is important as it shows the importance of all the in-the-person and in-the-environment factors that affect just whether you will reach your threshold for symptoms to occur. You can read all about the idea of the “Total Body Load” in Chapter 2 of my book describing the detail of all the factors such as hormones, stress, or smells, which contribute to whether or not you will have a reaction.
Overall the best way to find out what you do and do not tolerate is to use the Diet Detective Method to cut out sufficient foods to start with [but not too many] and reintroduce them using all the tricks so you have the maximum chance of tolerance. All the information on how to do this is in Are You Food Sensitive?
Thanks again for sharing your knowledge of your amine sensitivity with others.
All the best with your own diet detective work!
Joan Breakey Specialist food sensitivity dietitian.
Leave a Reply