Discover Hidden Histamine Triggers: Insights & Solutions

Becky Campbell, ND

I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for putting up with my schedule changes.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

No problem. Well, we will dive into why some of those things are happening because you and I were discussing beforehand that we both had some personal issues with mold and remediation and all of the things that we’re talking a lot about. But before we dive into all things histamine-related and jump into some of that, can you give us a little bit of your background? Because I know I love to share. I know you have a personal story, like so many of us do, and sometimes it’s just nice to hear, Hey, we’ve been here. We’ve been through a lot of these things.

Becky Campbell, ND

Yes. I can say, like, as a kid, I’ve never felt what I would call normal. I always could compare myself to other kids and realize I was heat sensitive. I was getting headaches when other kids weren’t getting headaches. I remember my mom working at my elementary school, and I would go downstairs and I’d be like, I have a headache and I need an aspirin or whatever. When I was young, I would pass out in the heat or I would get hives randomly. I didn’t get hives a lot, but it would happen. It always felt like something was different. Then when I went and, when I was in college and I was working hard and very stressed and not sleeping enough and probably working out too hard, it all hit me. I gained 30 pounds out of nowhere. I was always pretty thin, and I was always training and all that type of stuff. I ate well, as far as what we knew about diet back then, and I was having terrible brain fog. My hair was falling out, and I was getting bad anxiety. I was finding myself sitting in class and having to leave because I was so anxious, and I didn’t know what that was from. I didn’t know why any of this was going on. Then you get symptoms, and you get anxious about your symptoms. I was having body anxiety. I was so uncomfortable in my own body. 

I went from doctor to doctor; every part was like a Neurologist, Gastroenterologist, and Endocrinologist. Everyone was like, You’re fine because I, I looked fine, my blood work was fine, and they did barely any, to begin with. Long story short, I found it, and it wasn’t the term functional medicine wasn’t around back then, but it was like a holistic health care center I found. They were great. They did a thorough blood panel and found out I had hypothyroidism, which I would later find out was Hashimoto’s. Then they did some; at the time, the only available thing was saliva testing and blood testing for cortisol. I had super high cortisol, which is your stress hormone, and hence weight gain, brain fog, and all that stuff. Then I had yeast overgrowth in my gut. I had H. pylori. I had parasites. I had a lot going on. I didn’t have a lot of gut symptoms. It was mostly because I got a lot of brain symptoms. That was my diagnosis. You have Hashimoto’s. So I worked through a lot of the stuff that they found. I changed my diet, but I wasn’t doing a low-histamine diet because I didn’t know anything about histamine, our mast activation syndrome at the time. I felt a lot better. But I wasn’t still great. I knew something was still off.

I noticed that I was with my, so I have three kids. With my pregnancies, my first trimester was awful. I was hyper-stressed with each one. But then in my second and third trimesters, I would feel good. What I would consider normal. We can get into this later, but it’s because they’re in our placenta. There’s a lot of the enzyme that breaks down histamine in the second and third trimesters. Anyway, I just started to learn about histamine, and I realized there was a lot of correlation with what I was eating. Then I would get crawling sensations on my scalp, or I would get a migraine, or I would feel tired or dizzy after I ate, or I would have some skin irritation. I had a lot of, like, dermatitis up here around my nose. That’s when I figured out what mast cell activation syndrome was and that I had mast activation syndrome, and it was calling, causing me to have histamine intolerance. Then I went down the rabbit hole of what this is. What causes this? What can I do about it? Then, once I learned all of that stuff, I decided I needed to help people who have this primarily. I mean, I work with a lot of things, but. That’s when I wrote my book on Histamine Intolerance, mostly in our practice, we see a lot of histamine and mast cell types in people.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

Yes, that’s many of the things you’re saying sound like. I know my mother, even just recently, said you’ve always been so sensitive to this world. She said that to me as an adult, like three months ago, because it’s like looking back at all the things that you’re saying. Why are all of these things happening to me but not to anyone else? It builds up over the years. I also had anxiety—such bad anxiety—and didn’t realize all of these things were connected. I think it’s tricky for people because, when you think of histamine, you’re thinking of allergies. I mean, we just think of that. But there are so many more symptoms because we have receptors everywhere.

Becky Campbell, ND

Yes. I never had allergies. Exactly. You think histamine; you think Zyrtec. That’s as far as your brain goes with histamine. Going back to the point of being sensitive, that’s probably been my biggest issue with all of this: being so sensitive and learning that I’m a poor detoxer from doing testing and stuff. Then I hold on to every single toxin I come into contact with, which makes me so sensitive. I used to be extremely food-sensitive and extremely chemically sensitive. Then you start getting self-conscious because you feel like the person that everyone thinks is weird; no one can relate to you around you, and you’re embarrassed to say that. The sun is making you feel weird. The smell is making you feel weird, the food is making you feel weird, and it’s hard to connect with people. It’s hard to be in a relationship. It can affect so many areas of your life that people don’t understand.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

Yes.  It’s invisible. So I think that’s.

Becky Campbell, ND

Exactly.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

especially when you’re going to your doctor and they’re saying you’re fine, you look good, and everything’s okay. Like, everything is not fine.

Becky Campbell, ND

I know. Exactly.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

When you work with people who have a lot of these sensitivities, I know that’s one of the problems that we see. Okay, we’re trying to do some of these things to detox for treatments, but we’re reacting to everything. Where do you start?

Becky Campbell, ND

Yes. I’ve had to learn this the hard way. I had to learn it by learning myself. I was someone who could never take supplements. If you gave me a supplement, I would feel terrible. and it’s because your brain starts to see everything. We need to become sensitive. Your brain sees everything as a threat. You take a supplement. Even magnesium. I couldn’t tolerate it; you see it as a threat. Your body doesn’t like it. It reacts. It’s because my sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight or flight, was so, like, alert, high alert all the time that everything made me feel bad. 

I know how these sensitive patients are. I know how they feel, and they want to do the work, jump in, and take the supplement. We have to back off for a minute with that. The first thing I have people do is, if they’re sensitive if we know that they can’t tolerate supplements, we work first on some brain retraining. This is not what I do. I don’t teach people how to do this, but you’re teaching your body not to see something and remember it as being a threat over and over and over.  You’re trying to break that cycle and create new neural pathways. We use different brain-retraining systems. There are people I love. The Gupta program is good. My friend Lindsay has a program. She has a company called Vital Side. I usually refer people to order one of those, like an online program. They can do it at home. Start with that. Even if they can just start being aware of their breath, like, we’re like this all the time, and we’re, especially if you’re in sympathetic overdrive. 

I’m always like, Let’s check yourself first. I can check in with your body and relax your shoulders. Are you breathing? Are you taking a good breath in and a nice, slow breath out? If you’re not, start doing that. Like, even starting there can be helpful. and then once people get that, whether they’re doing meditation and breathwork or they’re doing a program, once they get their nervous system to calm down a little bit, I’ll start doing gentle detox. It depends on the person and what I’ll do with them. But for something as simple as dry brushing, we’ll have them start doing it a little bit. Just get that lymphatic system moving because we have these different pathways that we’re pushing toxins out of. With so many people with histamine intolerance and massage activation syndrome, they’re not doing that well. We have a lot of different SNPs in our jeans. They’re not working in the way that they’re supposed to. That’s part of the problem. We want you to be able to move stuff out. You can’t think of taking, like, a supplement to kill a gut infection or to pull the mold out if you can’t push it out. I want to make sure you’re pooping, make sure you’re drinking enough water, make sure you’re sweating all the way, and make sure you’re getting that lymphatic drainage so you can start with dry brushing. You can even do a little bit of rebounding, which is jumping on the trampoline, and just see if it helps move that lymph. 

I am obsessed with the infrared sauna. That’s been a game-changer. It’s been the biggest game changer in my overall health journey because I don’t sweat. I mean, even though I work out, I don’t work out to the degree where I’m pouring and sweating. Sweat is such a great way of getting toxins out of the body. In an infrared sauna, castor oil packs over the liver. People do well with that. Sometimes you get a little dizzy when you put on the first time, but that’s just showing you how much you have going on circulation, circulating in there that’s not coming out. I always have people start slow with that and then work their way up. Epsom salt baths are good too, or even a foot bath and Epsom salt if you don’t have a bathtub. Just those things. 

Once we get the brain stuff and then the gentle detox into place, I’ll start putting in something like a milk thistle, depending on whether they’re needed. I can tell there are various reasons people can’t tolerate different supplements. But, milk thistle and polycysteine, even phosphatidylcholine, there are different things you can do to just support gently. They support the liver. Glutathione is great. Some people can’t tolerate it. You just have to see that it’s like solidifying as a master antioxidant. It’s good to try to be able to do that. I’ll just do like little, tiny bits of it and start on like that. Getting there, their bodies pushing stuff out. Once they can do all that, then I know they’re ready to start working on what else is going on in the body.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

Drain properly. That’s like opening up. All because I know I agree: if you’re pushing anything without the drainage pathways being open, then you’re going to hold on to it more.

Becky Campbell, ND

Yes. You’re going to feel bad. You’re going to have a Herxheimer reaction, and then you’re going to quit. That’s why people have boxes and cabinets full of supplements because they take them. They go; I can’t tolerate this. They quit it. Then they go, that one’s okay. This is going to be the one. Like, this is going to be the supplement I’m going to be able to tolerate. Nope. I can’t tolerate that because they haven’t done any of those foundational things beforehand so that they can tolerate different supplements.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

I think that’s a great point because it is a long game. It’s something that you can do when you’re working with it, especially with histamine intolerance. Sometimes, we can find different things, like if we optimize the diamine oxidase or if we do some gut healing. But with mast cells, it’s often more of a longer game that you have to be patient, and sometimes it’s hard to be patient because we live in this fast-paced world.

Becky Campbell, ND

We live in a world where you have Amazon, and now it’s not even two days. I mean, it’s within the day sometimes. People are trained to expect fast results. That’s a very good point that you made. There’s a very big difference between someone with histamine intolerance without mass activation syndrome and someone with histamine intolerance with mast activation syndrome, or just mast cell activation syndrome. Without historical intolerance. You’re dealing with two different types of people. They’re very sensitive. They’re going to be your mast activation syndrome patients for that usually histamine intolerance that just came on later because you had a gut infection or, gut infection with estrogen dominance. Whatever it is, that’s easy. That’s a lot easier. 

You put them on a low-histamine diet, and then you can go right to work because they’re not so sensitive. That’s always fun because we feel like, okay, this is going well. They’re feeling so well quickly, It depends on what you have going on and how fast you’re going to get there. But I can say that almost everybody that I’ve worked with has that. They are at least getting much better. With mast cell activation, you have to be very conscious of your triggers, and you have to, and I have mast cell activation syndrome. I’m never going to wear perfume. I’m never going to eat food that’s going to cause inflammation in my body. But I can now eat high-histamine foods where I couldn’t before. I’m always going to be conscious of things that I should just stay away from. I’m not going to go stay in a moldy house. It just depends.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

Those are great points. I’m with you because I have teenage daughters, and I had to say to one of my daughters, You cannot wear perfume until you want to wear perfume. It’s all our friends who are starting to socialize. I’m like, it makes me so sick. We have, it’s one of those things that I get. I think again, you’re saying, okay, you feel different that, and I’m the one that can’t tolerate the smell. But as long as I know that and can express it, then we’re good. You’re in an environment that isn’t showing that. But the food I love. How have you also mentioned expanding your diet? Once you get a lot of these things under control, the low-histamine diet can feel limiting because there are so many dairy foods. But you can often tolerate many of the foods that you can eat at once. You get some of the underlying issues under control.

Becky Campbell, ND

Yes, I always say the low-histamine diet is not the low histamine intolerance. It is a tool to use while you’re working on what’s causing it. My goal with my patients, and just the message I want to send to everybody, is to start with a low-histamine diet. It’s going to help you. It’s going to help you fast, feel better. It’s as much as you can without getting to the root of the issue. But start there, then work on the other things. Then, because people go, well, how long do I have to do this diet for? I’m like, well if it’s the only thing you’re doing, you’re going to always do it. You have to get to the root of it. Start with the diet, then work on the other things—gut health, mold, whatever it is that’s causing the histamine intolerance in the first place. Then you can start adding back some of the high-histamine foods and see how you do. But I don’t ever recommend people eat just trashy foods like high-histamine foods, which are very nutrient-dense. I want them to put those back in. But I don’t want them to put in things like gluten. Yes. Because there’s like no point. It doesn’t serve anyone.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

We’re looking for. But it’s nice. I think it’s one of those things because you can give someone a low-histamine diet, and it can feel overwhelming. That’s why you and I both have systems that are in place for people to support throughout the process, but then it is adding them back in and saying, Okay, what do I tolerate? Then the threshold of what you can, I think, can be an issue too.

Becky Campbell, ND

Yes, exactly. I like to use the histamine back in an allergy. Okay. Well, what’s filling up your histamine bucket is stress, mold, vitamin deficiencies, hormone imbalance, and gut infections. Don’t bother trying that avocado. Yes. But get rid of some of that stuff. Then you can start. There’s room in that bucket to add some back. But some days your bucket might be fuller because you’re very stressed or you may be in an environmental situation. You may have gone to someone’s house; they’ve got plug-ins going; they’ve got maybe some mold or whatever it is; or they’re wearing perfume or whatever the situation, and you’re not going to be able to tolerate that. Or you may have some alcohol, and then you can’t tolerate it; you have to just balance everything out. You always have to be thinking about that bucket. You have to understand that if you started eating high-histamine foods and were doing great, and then one day you couldn’t, you didn’t feel like you were not done. You’re not like starting over. You just had your bucket full that day. Maybe it was full that week. You need to start looking again at what’s going on this week. I am very stressed; I do not sleep, I do too much exercise, or something else is triggering me, and then I figure that out. Then you can go back to adding more of those foods. It’s going to vary.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

Yes, that’s a great point, even with hormones throughout the month.

Becky Campbell, ND

Yes. With ovulation and around ovulation people, I have some people who only have histamine intolerance right before ovulation or around ovulation and the week before their period when estrogen’s doing this, and then otherwise they’re fine. I’m like, then just be conscious of that.  Also, we’re like, well, maybe you’re going too high, and we work on that stuff too. But there are a lot of different variations on why this is happening.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

Yes, those are all great points. I know one of the things that you and I talked about before we got on is the fact that we both had some remediations in our house with mold, and that’s another thing that can be at the root of a lot of these issues. Let’s dive into that a little bit.

Becky Campbell, ND

Yes. I’ve found that, so I wasn’t doing micro-toxin testing on everybody. I was testing pretty much everything and everyone for gut and hormone sufferers. Then I realized how all these people have mold, and I was like, so I started testing with, my patients for mycotoxins. Many of them are coming up high. What happens is that it’s mycotoxins. Molds spit out these toxic chemicals called mycotoxins. Those are microscopic. They’re just in the air. You can walk through them and have no idea they are there. They get into their lungs, but they go past the lungs into circulation, and they start affecting us everywhere. They’re lipophilic. They love fatty areas. They love the brain, they love the liver, and they love our vessels. When you have mycotoxins in your body, they’re activating your mast cells. Your mast cells are ready to go. Well, what is that threat? Let me send out histamine and all these other inflammatory chemicals to get rid of that threat, which is the mold, and until that mold forms in your body, your mast cells are constantly being activated. Mold alone, I think, can cause mass activation syndrome. 

If you’re living in mold or being exposed to mold, you have to get out of that environment. This is why we were talking about everything that we’re going through now. It’s hard. Mold is hard. It’s one of the least favorite things I have to tell a patient, as you have mold, and sometimes it’s a pass exposure, which is easier. But if it’s a current exposure, you have to figure out, okay, where’s the source? It’s not always easy to find. I was telling you, I fear that I. My house is five years old. I bought it three years ago. The first night I slept here, I felt weird. I was shaking—internal shaking. That’s like my mold sign. I didn’t know exactly at the time. I thought I had too many EMFs here; I was unplugging all the Wi-Fi and doing everything I could. I smelled mold in a closet a little bit. No one else could smell it. Everyone’s like, That’s not mold. That’s what I had, like, would, organizer,  or whatever. the guy that’s just that, and I’m like, no, it’s not inspectors. I mean multiple people. No, you don’t have mold in there. I finally hired someone to just knock the other side of the wall down. Behind the wall with mold. and it’s been hard because it’s a lot of work. That wasn’t the last place we had it. We started finding it in more places. 

No one wants to think that their home is the problem. This is where we spend most of our time. No one wants to think that this is the reason we’re sick. It doesn’t have to be an older home. It doesn’t mean that your home can be beautiful. It has nothing to do with that. It just has to do. Sometimes building materials get wet when they’re building your house. They install it, and mold starts to grow. Then there’s, the problem getting worse and worse. Anyway, if you’re trying different things and you’re working on the guy, you’re working on trash, or you’re working on all these things and you’re just not feeling well, it’s time to start looking for mold, because I have found it is the culprit, and probably 70% of the people I work with have had either a past exposure that’s still bothering them or they’re living in it now.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

When you see people who have that, that’s something I know a lot of people will be asking. Now,  how do you determine if it’s a past exposure or if you’re currently living in it?

Becky Campbell, ND

Yes. It’s hard to know. I would love to know what the testing tells me, but the testing is hard if you’re doing a poor detox. The way the testing works. I do different types of testing. I’m just going to talk about the urine test today. With the urine test, you’re putting urine. They’re finding mycotoxins in the urine because that’s how we eliminate them.  But if you’re on a very poor detox, you don’t have good kidney function. You’re not going to show up, or am I going to show up like the bars are this big and I’m like, and they’re like, I don’t have it. I’m like, yes, you do. You have it. You’re a poor detoxer. We can provoke it. Sometimes I go to the sauna before my next test, and then it’s like coming up; it’s higher. It’s hard to know based on the test. But if I see someone who’s high, I’m like, You’re living in it. I think you’re living in it. Now your next step is to maybe do an ERMI test. If you don’t want to hire an inspector, maybe start with an ERMI test where you’re collecting dust or sending it into labs, telling you if they found different types of mold in your house, or you can find a good inspector, which I don’t know if you’ve interviewed any, but some very good mold inspectors can help you, either globally or they can help you find someone in your area. but it’s important to find someone who’s going to be thorough. 

Because I knew a lot of people and I still had the wrong inspectors here, I had to listen to my gut. I knew something was off because I could smell it. I was lucky that I could smell it. Many times mold is there with no smell; there’s the smell, not the mycotoxins. Mycotoxins don’t smell. It’s the other, like the VOCs and aldehydes and alcohols that mold. I met someone who has a smell once it hits oxygen. If it’s hidden behind a wall, you’re not going to smell anything much at the time. But if you’re just feeling bad and, let’s say, you noticed, you leave your house and you feel better, or you go on vacation and you feel better, and then you come home and you start feeling bad again. You probably have it in your home. I would say test your body, see if you show up anything, then test, maybe with an ERMI test, and then if that comes up, you want to probably get a proper inspection.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

We can link all of those to the summit. I have a summit resource page and link all of those so people can have resources and look depending on where they live and all of those things. But yes, and no, it is a process, and it is hard to do it. I had someone call me one time, and she said, I want to work with you, but you have to promise me that you won’t, that you won’t test me for mold because she worked with that. She had a friend who was just like her; she spent thousands of dollars, and I didn’t want to go there. I’m like, well, what? We have to look at a broad picture. But I feel like it was one of those things. It was just an interesting perspective for the clinician to hear. Okay, I don’t want to look at everything, but I’m afraid to go there because, like you’re saying, it’s very overwhelming.

Becky Campbell, ND

It is overwhelming. I’ve been through it before. This is my second round with mold. I was bedridden the first time, and this is different. Because I’m a good detoxer, I support my detox pathways a lot and that’s helped me. Plus, it’s a further way for me than it was in any other house. But nobody wants to deal with it. Nobody does. But nobody wants to be sick either. I have no kitchen now, and I have three kids, and I’m trying to cook off of a table with, like, an air fryer every night. I am not having a good time, but I know that it’s worth it. I know that, in the end, it’s what’s best for me. It’s what’s best for my family and my kids. I have to think about them, too, because they were feeling, and I could tell they weren’t feeling, and I could tell it was mold. Yes, sometimes we have to do stuff like this, but it is worth it to get through it.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

Yes, absolutely. Well, you’ve given us such great information. Thank you so much. Can you tell everyone where they can find you?

Becky Campbell, ND

My website is drbeckycampbell.com. I have to take patients virtually. I have online courses, books, and all that stuff. Then I’m most active on Instagram at @drbeckycampbell. I am also active on Facebook, and that’s just Dr. Becky Campbell.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

Becky Campbell, ND

Yes, thanks for having me.

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

Have a great day, everyone.

Becky Campbell, ND

You too.