916: Histamine Intolerance, Remedies and Recovery with Steven Wright

Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from barbaraoneill.online and I am here today with my good friend Steven Wright to dive into a topic I have not thoroughly covered on this podcast yet, which is the topic of histamine and specifically histamine intolerance, remedies, recovery, what is actually going on in the body. And how to get to a point of actually being able to consume histamine-containing foods again and to not struggle with this.

Steven does a great job of dissecting and explaining what’s going on when this is out of balance, which can be kind of multifactorial. What the things are that are necessary for the body to come back into balance related to this and then sort of supporting topics around and related to gut health and immune health and what he sees is some of the cutting-edge therapies related to this. I’ve had Steven on before. He is a health engineer, functional medicine expert, and the founder of the Healthy Gut Company. And I always learn so much from him. He really has a super deep understanding of gut health and so many things related to gut health.

I feel like he’s doing some really innovative stuff. I’ve personally benefited a lot from stuff I’ve learned from him. And he has helped more than 12,000 people, including a thousand with really tough cases. And he’s trusted by people all over the world. So let’s learn from Steven. Steven, welcome back. Thank you for being here again.

Steven: Katie, I’m always excited to talk to you.

Katie: Likewise, we were just saying before we hit record, I miss hanging out with you in person and our conversations, which are always so fun, but I’m glad we get to at least connect here virtually and record this conversation. If people missed it, I know we’ve had multiple conversations before. I will link to those in the show notes and you have such wide expertise on so many topics. I feel like we can have endless future conversations. In this one, though, I’m really excited to dive deep on something I have not ever gone directly into on this podcast, which is the topic of histamine, specifically histamine intolerance, what we can do about it, how do we recover?
There’s a lot, I know a lot, in this topic, so maybe to start off broad, can you sort of walk us through defining kind of what is the problem? What is histamine intolerance? Is it real? Like, walk us through understanding this topic.

Steven: Yeah, well, it’s a fun topic for me because I was a histamine intolerance denier. I was fully in denial, even though I have a history of seasonal allergies where I’d wake up and my eyes were kind of caked shut. I would be on Claritin as a child quite often through my teen years and then sometimes in my 20s. And then I would be prone to these sneezing fits and you, I don’t know if I’ve ever done one around you, Katie, but sometimes when I sneeze, I sneeze like for 10 minutes straight. It’s kind of intense. And I had some people around me five years ago who were like, man, it sounds like you have some histamine problems.

I’m like, I don’t have those. I don’t have those things. And what’s been really fascinating over the last five years is to dive into this and realize just how prevalent it is, but how much in our culture we tend to sort of paper over the symptoms and just say, that’s kind of normal or that’s common or it doesn’t really bug me that much.
And as somebody who’s kind of gotten a handle on it now, I can tell you that I had a mild case of it. And when you’re having those seasonal allergy days where your brain’s foggy, your eyes are scratchy or sinuses are swelled shut, these types of things, it really, at least for me, it bugs me all day.

It’s harder to be like a good person. It’s harder to be happy. It’s harder to be energized. And so histamine intolerance in general is super real and it’s super common. And what it is is literally a simple equation and I’m going to try to refer to this equation a lot as we go through this talk today, but it is an equation in balance.

So you make histamine every single day. Histamine is not the bad guy. It is just like your hormones, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. You do not want too much of it and you do not want too little of histamine. But histamine should be balanced in this equation with an enzyme called DAO or diamine oxidase. And when they are out of balance, when you make too much histamine, you don’t have enough ability to break it down. Then you have symptoms that we are going to go into some weird, obscure ones that people might really get some relief from. But also you have those typical allergy or environmental allergy-like experiences.

Katie: Okay, so then yeah, I feel like that’s a perfect springboard into what are kind of some of the signs and symptoms? It sounds like they might overlap with potentially other things going on and or people might attribute them to other things and not realize they actually have some kind of histamine imbalance happening.
I suspect this was actually me years ago because I knew I had autoimmune stuff going on. There was inflammation happening. I was doing autoimmune diet and a lot of things to try to mitigate the autoimmune symptoms and I have a feeling I also had underlying histamine issues going on. I just didn’t know at the time to pay attention to that or even what to understand related to histamine.

Steven: Yeah, and that’s really common for them to concurrently occur. And the reason why is that the main enzyme, DAO, is made in the small intestine. We’ll circle back to that. But what are the signs and symptoms? Like, how would you know? Can you go get a test? Things like that. In general, there’s really not any good testing options at the moment.

You would want to be testing things like the histamine levels in your blood. However, those tests are hard to get, and they’re a little unreliable if you don’t get multiple data points because we don’t know what your baseline blood levels are, and it’s kind of all over the place. So the best thing at this moment in time in 2025 is: what are your signs and symptoms?

And so base-level screaming red flags, are what I talked about a little bit earlier, which is all your traditional seasonal allergy things. Do your eyes get itchy and scratchy and watery? Do your sinuses swell shut. Do you get brain foggy? Sometimes you get racing heart. These are things that can happen around seasonal allergy timeframes. But for people with histamine intolerance, what they will often find is if they have a mild case, they will also have it in response to certain foods or certain times of the year where their stress goes up. If you have a more extreme case of histamine intolerance, everything kind of is on a spectrum. You will have this in reaction to regular foods. Things like eggplants, spinach, strawberry, wine, cheese, fish. And you will have things like tachycardia, which is racing heart. You can get immediate brain fog. You can get immediate bloating. You can get urticaria or sort of like bumps on your skin and sort of rashes. You can get the flushing in your cheeks if you drink wine, for instance, or beer, which contains a lot of yeast, which is a lot of histamine, and you immediately flush, you feel that warmness in your cheeks.

That’s a histamine response, and if you can’t clear that out by not having enough DAO, you end up in this histamine intolerance place where you’re making too much histamine and not enough of the ability to actually block it out. The story gets deeper when you start to intertwine with autoimmune conditions.

So you start to get headaches, especially around menstrual cycles. Migraines in the literature, the scientific literature, are one portion—not all migraines, but a subset of migraine sufferers—are triggered by histamine. You have ADHD that can be helped by lowering histamine levels. You have fibromyalgia, car sickness, motion sickness.
So there’s these really crazy odd things out there that are highly intertwined to histamine. And it kind of comes down to the actual reason why this is happening, which we’ll keep unpacking as we go here.

Katie: Yeah, it seems like this very much can be a missing piece for a lot of people probably, and the fact that it can connect to stress levels, to inflammation, like there’s always overlap. It’s almost never something in isolation, but it seems like this can often go hand in hand and that seemingly some things you might be doing to try to mitigate something else you’ve got going on could make the histamine condition worse if you’re not aware of it.
I suspect that’s what happened to me because at one point I randomly had kind of like full-body hives and itching that I couldn’t pinpoint what was going on. Nothing seemed to help. It eventually just went away on its own with some other changes that I had made, but that was definitely an uncomfortable experience and period of my life.
Okay, so let’s go a little deeper on DAO because I feel like this alone may be a new thing to understand for a lot of people and seemingly like a very pivotal point when it comes to histamine.

Steven: Yeah. So again, histamine is not a… if histamine intolerance gets really bad, like mast cell activation syndrome, and in these histamine intolerance circles, in the mast cell activation circles, histamine becomes this enemy. And I really want to encourage people that histamine is not the enemy.
Your body’s not trying to harm you. It’s just trying to go about life. And so we make histamine. Histamine actually is important for digestion. It’s important for all kinds of things. And then we break histamine down. So that’s happening all day long. And there’s essentially two enzymes that break histamine down.

One is diamine oxidase. The other one’s HNMT. HNMT is in your cells. It’s kind of like a secondary one. We can’t really, we don’t know how to affect it yet in functional or integrative medicine. Research is very scant on it. There’s not a lot we can do there. And it’s also not the, it’s like the 80/20 analysis; you want to focus on diamine oxidase.
So diamine oxidase is what we’ll focus on. It is a brush border enzyme, which if you’ve listened to some of our chats in the past on the podcast, this may not be a new concept for I think for most people, it will be. Brush border is the little hairs inside your small intestine, and they make a lot of different things.

And one of the things they make are enzymes that finish off the digestion of our food, mostly carbohydrates. But also in this case, they make diamine oxidase, DAO. If you have a condition, say celiac disease, where your villi are blunted, damaged, inflamed, that means your brush border is really messed up.
The villi are part of the brush border, and you will not make enough DAO. And so if you have any sort of inflammatory condition that’s happening, especially impacting the small intestine, you’re not going to release enough DAO. And that then sets up the equation to be imbalanced. Even if you have a normal mast cell process, even if you have a normal body process, you just won’t have enough DAO.
Now, the other unfortunate thing is there are some genetic snips that are beyond my scope of being able to just rattle them off on a podcast. But you can just Google them really quickly. Not all genetic companies that do testing test for them. So that also complicates the thing. There are some new startups that are working on this in the UK and the EU where they’ll test you for these, but if you have some genetic snips, it is also likely that you just don’t genetically make enough DAO.

And that’s somewhere around 10 to 15 percent of the population. You’re always kind of in the hole when it comes to making the main histamine breakdown enzyme. And so if you couple inflammation, stress, some genetic snips, potentially, you can end up in this area where you don’t make enough DAO. And then if you don’t make enough DAO, it literally just grabs the histamine and chomps it up.

It’s an enzyme. It’s literally just deactivates it immediately. And so you end up in this situation where the equation is always going to be imbalanced, and it’s really hard to figure anything out if you don’t directly address the DAO.

Katie: Got it. Okay. So someone is maybe hearing elements of this and wondering if this is what they have going on. From a practical standpoint, how do you like, where’s the starting point to begin addressing histamine-related issues? I know there’s some dietary factors that can come into play, seemingly also some lifestyle factors, and then now like supplementation side as well to support the things you just explained with DAO.

Steven: Yeah. So, highest level, there are some drug interactions that deactivate DAO. So you can just Google that. Most of them are around blood pressure or stomach acid reduction, which, you know, I’m not a fan of. And so some medications do block DAO. So you can Google your medication and just does it block DAO?

And the AIs and Google will help you figure that out real quickly. Beyond that, you’re going to want to identify if you are accidentally eating some super high-histamine foods. And that is really common in the autoimmune paleo crowd. It’s really common in any sort of healthy eating crowd because these foods are both usually delicious and nutrient-dense.

And that is frustrating, right? One of those is basically the entire category of fish. So fish just naturally causes us to release a lot more histamine. And so if you are noticing that, “Hey, I have salmon twice a week and I just like, salmon’s supposed to be this amazing food, and I just don’t feel that good afterwards,” it could be that you have histamine intolerance. So you might want to lower the highest, I’m not a huge fan of going on a full low-histamine diet because, again, you can never … it’s like the FODMAP diet. You can never get them completely gone. And the goal is not to live a life free of histamine foods or free of FODMAPs.

The goal is to develop a body that can handle regular foods. And so these foods are things like cheese, all the fermented foods, bone broth, your highest vegetables are things like tomatoes, eggplant, strawberries, spinach. Any leftovers would be cut out immediately. So that’s the other thing. If you’re like, “I don’t have histamine intolerance,” but you start to notice that you have flare-ups like every second or third day, it might be because you’re eating leftovers on that second or third day because you batch cook because, you know, it’s just easier, especially when you’re eating a real food diet, to batch cook and things like that.

So it becomes this, histamine intolerance can become this thing where you’re always chasing your tail around what is triggering it. And you might start blaming the food. You could start “I definitely have parasites.” You watch some video on the internet and you’re like, “Oh, I definitely have that thing.” But in general, histamine intolerance definitely concurs with a lot of other conditions. So if you have another issue, like especially digestive issues, you’re at risk for these histamine things. So step one would be: are you taking any medications that are directly blocking DAO? If you can cycle off of those, find a replacement with your doctor, that’d be great. Step two, cut out the highest histamine-producing foods for a week or two to see how you feel. See if your skin clears up, see if your nasal passages clean up, see if your GI tract is better. And then next would be try some supplementation because you can now directly take DAO. It’s been on the market for 10 to 15 years, but there’s been issues, which is why I’ve never talked about it publicly. I’ve never used it clinically until the last few years. And then now we carry a product that meets my criteria for a product that actually works. And part of the reason why is it’s really hard to get it.

And there’s a lot of stability issues with the molecule, but now you can also directly take the DAO. And so that is kind of a big breakthrough. And that is also one of those things where if you take it, you feel better, like that’s the confirmation you have the issue.

Katie: Well, I think you brought up such an important point too, is like, the goal is not to figure out what we have going on with our health so that we can restrict in a way that mitigates those symptoms for the long term. The goal is to actually let our bodies heal and become resilient such that we can handle, like you said, all like kind of normal interactions with foods.

So this is, I want to clarify also, hopefully a short-term thing. Like one theme that I’ve had emerge over time is the body is infinitely capable of healing, especially when we learn to speak its language and to listen to what it’s asking for. And it seems like that’s what you’re saying here as well with histamine, which I feel like is very important to touch on and to provide hope around is thankfully, this does not seem like a lifelong thing. Even if you do discover you have histamine stuff going on, it’s just an important piece to know so that you can support your body in healing and recovery. But can you dive deeper on that if that’s the case and make sure I’m on the right track?
Steven: Yeah. Yeah. You 100 percent are. So again, let’s think through how this would occur. This would occur when you do not have, you make too much histamine or you do not break down the histamine with DAO. So every single condition that’s ever been studied, there’s typically inflammation in the gut.

There’s typically gut permeability or leaky gut, and there’s microbiome dysbiosis. All of those that process contributes to lower DAO. So it should not be surprising to you if you have any chronic condition, autoimmune in nature or gut in nature or something like you’re dealing with especially if you’re dealing with mold or some sort of viral thing like it’s almost universally accepted that you will also have a histamine component.

And so the message is one: I believe when we are feeling better on a day-to-day basis like when you’re literally happier, feeling healthier, more excited about life, it’s so infinitely easier to do healthy things. It’s like this feedback cycle where health creates more health, but also feeling bad creates more feeling bad, right? Because we’re humans we don’t like to feel bad. And so if you’re struggling that day, it’s so much easier to have a food that you don’t want to eat sugar, alcohol, not exercise, not go outside, whatever it is. And so I’m a huge believer in what supplements can we bring in that help with healing that take away those painful days so that we can keep our health going up, not going down. And then, as you correct the underlying conditions of histamine intolerance, which are typically related to your inflammation in your gut, they’re typically related to sometimes some toxicity or some nervous system imbalances, then you can bridge off of the supplementation and go back throughout your life.

So I no longer have seasonal allergies. And like I said, I used to wake up with eyes completely shut. My wife, Shea, has been on Claritin for 25 years. I’ve gotten her off Claritin with a combination of DAO and some other products. She used to have headaches before almost every cycle. She no longer has those headaches during pre-cycle and during her menstrual cycle.

Huge breakthrough, right? She didn’t necessarily call them migraines, but man, she would lose a day a week to these things or having to take these other medications. So if you can change that and then begin to heal the gut, you’re going to be in a better place. And so I think of these as tools in your toolkit. Like we have moms who have car-sick kids. You can carry these DAO tablets in your purse and give them to your kids before a car ride and maybe have a better day. And so it’s kind of like how do we support our body in this world? And then how do we identify the conditions that are triggering the DAO imbalance or the histamine imbalance?

Katie: Yeah, I feel like that is a very practical key takeaway step is the DAO for car sickness, because I know many moms who have kids, and that is quite the stress, especially on road trips, of course, but even daily school rides can get really stressful when there’s motion sickness.
And I only tend to experience that in the past on boats, thankfully, and it’s not a very fun or comfortable experience. So my heart goes out to people who are in that. And I know we originally many of our past conversations go deep on the gut health side, and I’ll make sure those are in the show notes so people can listen for foundational knowledge.
But I feel like some of that also is worth touching on again a little bit in this conversation as a refresher, because as you’ve illustrated, gut health is obviously connected to essentially everything in the body. And again, with this histamine component, it’s very important there as well.

And I know in the modern world, there’s a lot of things that we do that are not supportive of gut health and pretty detrimental. And that it seemingly from our past conversations, there are some shifts we can make and some ways we can support with supplementation that make a really drastic difference, and then those positive ripples end up in every area of life as well.

So, like I said, I originally learned from you about gut health. That’s where I first knew you as, and you know so much about it. Can you give us a little bit of a primer in the 80/20 maybe top ways we can support our gut health?

Steven: Yeah, so I would say the top ways are to stop over-indexing on your diet. We’ve spent the last 15 years trying to remove foods and trying to blame foods for being toxic, and yes, please don’t eat Crisco and please avoid some of these really bad foods. If you could get off gluten, that’s probably going to help you, but beyond that, I’ve moved into this place of I think the world might have gone a little too toxic.

Like, we might our nervous systems are a little stressed. We’re always in Wi-Fi. We’re always exposed to blue light and phones and all these different things. There’s 80,000-plus new chemicals since the 1980s. The cat’s out of the bag. The stuff’s not going away, and it doesn’t matter how much we want to be angry about it or scared about it.
It is the reality. And so I’ve kind of shifted to, all right, well, how do I get my body to handle the foods? Like, for instance, I love cheese. I love wine. I love fermented foods. All those things are absolute no-nos for somebody with histamine intolerance. So how do I build a body that can handle those foods?

Because I don’t think there’s anything inherently toxic about a glass of wine here or there, or anything inherently toxic about cheese or something like that. And so the answer to me is optimizing your enzymes and your butyrate. So your enzymes are, we talked on DAO that’s just one enzyme that just does histamine.

But there’s enzymes for proteins, enzymes for fats and carbohydrates. There’s specialty enzymes that then break down your food even further, like the cell walls and the prebiotics and the fibers. And there’s a whole cascade of digestion processes, basically. And so if you can help your body with some added digestive enzymes…
Now, obviously, I’m pretty proud of our product. I think it’s the best one on the market. But as long as you get a practitioner-grade brand, I do think if you dose it right, you can really expand your diet and maybe get rid of some of the food fear and get into food freedom. The other thing that is emerging from the science is that butyrate is the key molecule for the gut. Like, it is beyond a question of a doubt. If this is the first time you’ve heard of butyrate, I think you will hear nothing about, there’ll be less and less conversations about probiotics. There’ll be more and more conversations about what’s called short-chain fatty acids and butyrate in the coming five years. The majority of podcasts will be shifting that direction. Butyrate is not something we produce like, we can’t make it inside of our body. Our gut microbiome makes it from the food we eat. So we are literally in a symbiotic relationship with the bugs in our gut that make this compound butyrate. And this butyrate it goes everywhere.

There’s research on neurodegeneration, osteoporosis, asthma, a ton of stuff in the gut. And so if you don’t have enough of it, you’re at high risk for almost every condition out there. That’s why you hear people say microbiome dysbiosis, which basically means disrupted microbiome, is linked to all diseases, mostly because then you don’t make these beneficial compounds that we need. Butyrate also happens to be a very good mast cell stabilizer. Mast cells are these specialized immune cells. They’re the ones that mostly release histamine. Okay. And so they’re like part of the immune system. They release histamine. And in general, again, they’re not the bad guys, but they’re supposed to have like kind of a protective force around them let’s say. If you imagine, I love analogies and I love pictures. I wish I could just drop pictures on my screen that I see in my head, but I’m not that talented. But mast cells are not supposed to be on the front line of the battle. They’re supposed to be back a little bit, and when they get too close to the front line, they’re just signaling they’re just they’re like, “Hey, it’s windy! Hey, there’s a dog! Hey, there’s food!” They’re just shooting off histamine, saying, “Hey, hey, hey!” We don’t want that.

We want them to be more measured in how they release their histamine. And part of the breakdown of the gut is if you start to lose butyrate production, if your microbiome starts to go down, you start to lose your thickness of your mucosal layer. You start to lose butyrate. Butyrate is partially what’s stabilizing these mast cells.

And basically, it’s like think of it like a weighted blanket, like how weighted blankets can help you with anxiety. Butyrate helps mast cells just kind of chill out and not release too much. So as you lose butyrate, as you lose mucosal thickness, as you get more inflammation and microbiome dysbiosis, the mast cells get really close to what’s happening in your gut rather than being several layers away.
And they just see everything. They’re like, “Oh, beef, histamine! Strawberries, histamine! Cheese, histamine!” They’re just seeing all the food you’re eating when they should be a little bit farther away so not as many different molecules get in contact with them or get into touch with them. And so butyrate is one of these keys if you’re trying to figure out your histamine intolerance, if you’re trying to figure out your gut and you’re just like, “I don’t know I have these random symptoms.” The symptoms you described here today, Steven, could be applied to IBS. They could be applied to some other autoimmune condition, and it’s true.

They could because they overlap so much. One of the cores to all of those conditions is low butyrate. And so if you can increase your butyrate, you can typically cause those mast cells to be less hypervigilant. They will stop being extraordinarily reactive. You have less histamine coming out.
That means you need less DAO. And so let’s say you need supplementation of our HistaHarmony product, maybe you need four a day or six a day right now to feel good every single day. As you rebuild your gut, as you get a better microbiome and more butyrate, you can start tapering down. And as you figure out, say, “Oh my gosh, I’m low in digestive enzymes,” or “Maybe I had low stomach acid” as you correct these little things in your digestion, you create less and less histamine release. You need less and less DAO. So then you can start to taper off whatever supportive supplements you might be on. So there’s this sort complex interaction between all of them. And the beautiful thing about diamine oxidase supplementation, HistaHarmony, is that it can help with all the rest of them, all the rest of the symptoms, I mean, that you have. And if you can start to unpack your gut health in relation to your life, you can typically start to correct the histamine intolerance. And maybe it only happens like a few times a year.

Katie: That’s awesome. And I’m sure very like a hopeful message for a lot of the people listening. How quickly can that start to resolve when people make changes? It seems like with the gut, because there’s such high turnover there, we can see changes relatively rapidly, but is that true in this case as well?

Steven: Yes. Again, it’s on a spectrum, right? Like some people are like, “I’m constipated,” and they go to the bathroom every third day, and other people are like, “I’m constipated,” and they haven’t gone to the bathroom in 14 days. Totally different clinical presentations, and you have to handle them very differently. Some people cannot have a strawberry without having tachycardia going to lay down. Their face just totally flushes. They can’t think, they can’t have leftovers. They literally can’t touch fermented, no vinegars, no nothing that’s fermented. Other people like I said, when their inflammation cup gets a little full, when let’s say around the holidays or let’s say seasonal allergies, the pollen count’s kind of high then they start experiencing their symptoms, and they’re like, “Oh, I need to dig out the Claritin, the Benadryl,” which please don’t dig out the Benadryl anymore. That definitely can cause neurodegeneration over the long term. But if you’re one of those people where you’re like, “Oh yeah, on the bad days I take Claritin,” you’re having mild histamine intolerance.
Those people the mild people can see effect almost immediately. The studies on ADHD, on fibromyalgia, on migraines are pretty quick. Like, the studies don’t last long because it costs a lot of money. And these are supplement companies, so they don’t have a ton of money. The studies are only usually eight weeks or 12 weeks. And so you’re starting to see reduction in headache, reduction in pain scores, reduction in inability to focus almost within week two. I would say customer-wise with HistaHarmony if this is an issue for you and you get the right dose, the package says two, but the studies range from two to four per day.
We see if you’re on the mild end, that two to four per day is usually enough to see something almost immediately. If you’re on the more complex end like I said, you literally have to watch out what you eat, otherwise you may have to lay down you might need six or eight a day. So it obviously scales based on your issue. So number one, you can see a reduction in symptoms right away, but as you’ve mentioned, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re healing everything. You’re just kind of stopping the destruction, stopping the issues. If you then start to put a full gut-supportive protocal around that so let’s say you’re adding in HoloZymes, you’re adding in Tributyrin-X HoloZymes is our digestive enzyme, Tributyrin-X is our butyrate supplement you could again see significant changes within a week or two such that you’re like, “Oh, my stools are more comfortable, more consistent. I’m having less rashes, less acne” whatever the thing might be. If you get the right product at the right dose, I don’t believe you need to wait months and months.

So these people that are like, “You need to keep detoxing” I don’t buy that. The people are like, “Oh, your elimination diet’s not good enough. You’re still having these flare-ups” well, an elimination diet’s not going to address the fact that you may not have enough DAO. And the symptoms overlap. So this focus on continual removal, fear, constraint around how we’ve been doing the last 10 years of functional integrative medicine I think it was important. Because mycotoxins are bad, mold is bad, Lyme is bad, gluten can be very bad for most people. Those are all real things, but to blame the person or over-index on the person’s ability to manage their diet and say, “Oh, maybe now it’s strawberries. Maybe now it’s eggplant” it’s kind of crazy for you to have to think that way. I think we need to say, “Okay, yes, there’s bad things out there. And how do we build our bodies into resiliency such that we can handle these foods?” Because structurally, there’s not anything wrong with most foods.
They shouldn’t be flaring you up, and most bodies should be able to handle pollen season like, you shouldn’t have this massive reduction or massive reaction. If you have a body that’s in tune with nature, it’s in tune with where you live, it’s not stressed it shouldn’t have these reactions. It should just be like, “Oh, okay. Now there’s this new input called pollen. We’re going to deal with that. Now we’re eating steak today. Now we’re eating fish today. Now we’re eating lentils today.” It shouldn’t need this bubble-like life where you’re constantly eliminating, you’re constantly hunkering down and trying to be on guard for the next thing that could be triggering you.

Katie: That’s such a good point. I’ve been on the other end of that spiral, especially with the autoimmunity, and for a while kept just getting more and more restrictive, and to your point, I don’t think that’s the answer, but it is a very important reminder from our body to pay attention to what’s going on.
I think I now see sort of like symptoms as messengers that are really helpful like, it’s our body directly communicating loudly with us, which isn’t always comfortable. But in hindsight, I wish I had learned to listen to that language a little more easily a little earlier on. I think I could have saved myself some trouble, and yet it was a wild journey, and I learned a whole lot through that.

And I feel like every time I have you on, you’re on the cutting edge of some of the things that really help a lot, and things I’ve implemented from you have made a huge difference. For one thing, enzymes, that’s been absolutely life-changing for me. I know it is also for a lot of people, and you’ve touched on those in the context of histamine and a little bit in terms of gut health, but can we talk as kind ofa recap again about enzymes themselves, because I feel like this is just an easy game-changer that a lot of people don’t know enough about.

Steven: Yeah. Yeah. I mean the crazy thing about enzymes, the cool thing is it’s actually universally accepted. Integrative and the most granola-crunchy practitioners are into digestive enzymes. And then the most allopathic, most Western doctors also admit that digestive enzymes are extraordinarily important for your health. So digestive enzymes and the concept of enzymes is a universally accepted idea across all walks of health.

Unfortunately, it’s been forgotten in a way. It was huge in the ‘70s and ‘80s and early ‘90s. Then the probiotic revolution happened, and everyone got extraordinarily excited about probiotics. Unfortunately like when we mapped the DNA of the human and we found out, “Oh, there’s DNA. Oh, there’s epigenetics. Oh, I guess the DNA doesn’t matter as much as we thought” the same is true with probiotics. We’ve done 10-plus years now of more probiotics, and we really haven’t gotten the benefit that we were promised from that.

It’s not that probiotics are wrong or bad I take them. But you have to know that they are not the end-all, be-all. If you’re having gut issues, enzymes in general are more powerful than probiotics by a strong amount. And that message got lost in the excitement around the probiotic revolution. And so circling back to enzymes, what do they do? I like to think of them as like the Pac-Man game. They literally come through and they chop up your food in various ways. And so the other thing is to think about your finger. You have all these joints in your fingers. There’s various enzymes that literally cut the food particles at certain joints or certain bonds.

And so you turn a very complex 3D molecule of food into these very short, small segments of, say, glucose or fructose or peptides, which are, you’ve got to go from protein amino acids down to peptides. And then you’re absorbing that stuff. Fat is this big mess, and then we’ve got to cut it down into really small molecules of fat. The process of cutting it down the cleaving or cutting, just like you would shear off something in nature is with enzymes. We make enzymes all over the place. So we have pancreatic enzymes, we have the brush border enzymes, we have some microbiome enzymes, we have some enzymes in our stomach. We actually have some in our mouth.
So they’re all over the place, and they’re extraordinarily critical to digestion. What’s underappreciated as we age, it’s not just our eyesight that starts to fail. It’s not just our ovaries or our testes that start to give out. Also our digestive organs start to work less good. You know, they just make less enzymes.

They’re less capable. And so as we age, as you enter into perimenopause or menopause, you’re like, “I never had food sensitivities. I never had food problems.” Yes, there’s a progesterone, estrogen issue there like, hormones are extraordinarily important even to digestion but also your other organs, including your digestive organs, sometimes need a little care, a little TLC. And so digestive enzymes can be on the decline.

And then when that happens, the food doesn’t get chopped up as much, and you’re like, “Well, why does that really matter?” Well, it matters because if you’re sourcing like, let’s say you’re gardening, you’re getting local food, you’re trying to avoid pesticides, you’re putting all this effort and money into your food then if you don’t break it down fast enough, you literally don’t absorb the nutrients from it. And that is, to me, when I think about that and how much money I’ve spent over the last 15 years on local, organic, wild-caught everything to think that I might have been losing 20, 30, 40 percent of that to the toilet just because I didn’t have enough digestive enzymes is like I’m like, “Oh, that’s so painful.” It gets a little worse, though. If you don’t absorb it, guess who’s going to absorb it? Nature. So just like if you have kids and they keep putting food on the floor in the kitchen and you’re like, “Now we have ants,” or “Now there’s some mice or something in the garage because there was food out,” nature will show up wherever there’s food. It’s not the ants’ fault, it’s not the mice’s fault it’s the fact that there was food available. If we don’t absorb our food in the proper order of our digestion, it goes down to the bottom of the small intestine and it shouldn’t be there. And that’s where we get these blooms of SIBO, which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
We get these candida or yeast blooms. Basically, we can blame the bugs, but really the bugs are just able to grow because there’s a lot of extra food that we didn’t absorb before they were able to. And so you have this complex cycle with digestive enzymes where if you want all the nutrients you want the minerals, the vitamins, the macronutrients and if you want to absorb them in the proper order, you need to get that done at the top of the small intestine, the middle of the small intestine kind of on the way down. There’s very specific phase points where you absorb these nutrients. If we’re starting to get to the bottom of the small intestine and into the large intestine, and we have not broken down that food properly again, the body can only absorb certain-size molecules.

If the molecule is too large, the body cannot do anything with it. The small intestine is just like, “We can’t handle it. We can’t take that. Pass it on, put it on the conveyor belt. We can’t touch that.” If that happens, bugs will show up to eat your food for you. And then the rest of your nutrients whatever’s left ends up in the toilet.
So what happens when those bugs eat that food? Usually bloating, gas, food sensitivities because I don’t know if you’ve ever left a kombucha in your car in the summer.
Katie: Yeah. Or even just outside in Florida. It’s hot enough. Yep.

Steven: Okay. Yeah. If you’ve ever had to clean up a kombucha that is left in heat and blows up it is a mess. It’s terrible. Your body is 98 degrees. Those bugs in the kombucha are like the bugs inside your gut. They’re just getting more, they’re just getting heat, which makes them work harder, more excited. And then if you feed them more, they will make pressure. They will make gas. That’s what they do. That’s their form of metabolism. That gas and bloating has to go somewhere. And so that’s what we feel oftentimes when we feel gas and bloating and some other things. So if you’re into longevity, if you’re into eating well, but you’re dealing with some functional health issues or a history of health issues, or if you’re currently having gas, bloating those types of things I think digestive enzymes are the first order of business. They come before probiotics. They come before anything because they can have that big of a massive difference when you get a high-quality, practitioner-grade brand. Do not if it’s less than $30, it’s probably not going to work.

Katie: Yeah. Like I said, they’ve been a game-changer for me, and I experimented a lot with taking them like with food, taking them before bed, taking them at different times, and they seemingly work in different ways depending on the timing, which makes sense to me just as far as the cyclical nature of our bodies and the circadian rhythms that change throughout the day.

But again, it’s one thing I wish I could go back and tell myself and have learned about earlier. And so now anytime I get a chance to talk about it, I feel like it’s so helpful and so important and so overlooked. You’re right people, we finally are talking about probiotics. That’s awesome. I love those too.

And I feel like enzymes are not talked about enough. I’d also put choline on the list for me personally, but I love that these conversations are happening now and that you’re so on the cutting edge of this. And I love that we got to go into butyrate and enzymes again and histamine in this one. Are there any other things that you feel like are kind of the next wave of things we’re going to be learning about or that you are personally experimenting with that you think would be helpful for others?

Steven: Well, I think… so like if you had histamine intolerance and you were like, “I’m going to put a gun to your head, Steven. I’m going to kidnap your family if you do not help me with this” you know, “I’m going to shoot your family or I’m going to shoot you or something this is life or death.”
We have to get this handled. The missing component so if we were breaking our food down properly and fully with digestive enzymes, that gives our body less ability to basically get excited and hypervigilant and react to it. We’re taking Tributyrin-X butyrate, which is going to help restore your microbiome.
It’s going to help stop leaky gut. It’s going to restore your mucosal membranes. It’s going to go systemic and help you with all kinds of anti-inflammatory pathways. And it’s also going to be a mast cell stabilizer. So it’s basically going to be like hugging the mast cells and be like, “It’s okay. It’s okay. You don’t have to go crazy with the histamine today.” Then we take our DAO, our HistaHarmony, and we’re just making sure we don’t have a bucket overflow day where you get brain fog, you get whatever, your histamine rashes, hives whatever your issues are. The one missing component in that protocol is a product to help retrain your immune system about what is okay and what is not okay as far as reactions go. We have this myth in functional medicine, integrative medicine, that if we just remove the mold or if we just kill the parasite or we get rid of the underlying cause your immune system will just correct itself. That’s not true in any, it’s not true anywhere. If you break your shoulder, you break your arm, if you sprain your ankle bad enough you go through a rehab phase where you learn proper motions for that joint, for that body part, for that muscle group whatever it might be. If you break your brain, you get a concussion you go through a protocol to help that body part just be in life, work properly everything. But we don’t do that with the immune system.

And I think that’s a massive failure, and it’s the breakpoint on why people can’t add their foods back, why they can’t really get over the hump and be in that stable, resilient place. And they make there’s now a product it’s called, they’re dead probiotics.
They’re called paraprobiotics. So they’re literally probiotics that are heat-killed on purpose. When we do this, and there’s a bunch of studies there’s like over 20 different strains where they’ve done side-by-side studies with humans, where they give the live bug and the dead bug. They do different things.

They measure all kinds of blood markers, all kinds of parameters. They just do different things. The live bugs are good for some of the parts around keeping your gut healthy you know, they can be good at other things like muscle or fat loss or things like that and some mood benefits like, live bugs are cool for certain things. Dead bugs pretty much only do a few things, and they do that all about the immune system. They help the immune system essentially be less reactive, and they rehab it. They put it through a protocol where they say, “Okay, that’s too much of that cytokine reduce that down. That’s too much IgE production reduce that down.” There’s a bunch of studies on eczema, hay fever which is seasonal allergies. They have studies on all kinds of colds and flus and less lost work days, exercise performance, eye health, periodontal disease all these things from taking dead bugs that are absorbed in the gut. When they are absorbed, the immune system looks at them and then reacts to that. And over time, as that process happens day by day most of these studies are eight to 12 weeks over those eight to 12 weeks, typically the benefits just get better and better as the weeks go on because what you’re doing is, it’d be almost like if you were subtly sniffing pollen every day.

You’re exposing your body in an exposure-therapy way to these dead bugs. Your body’s not afraid of them because they’re dead. So it will grab them and bring them in, analyze them on a regular basis. And when it does that, it can dampen down an immune system that’s out of order or out of balance. We do not want a strong immune system.
We absolutely do not want it. That’s how you get a cytokine storm and you die from an infection. You want a balanced immune system that can use a hammer when it needs a hammer and it can use a feather when it needs to use a feather. And so paraprobiotics, I think, are going to be another revolution in this probiotic era where we start to realize, “Hey, we’re not doing anything that can really affect the immune system and tell it that it’s okay to not be so reactive to this food not be so reactive to these other things.” Now we’ve talked about how histamine does that and mast cells and butyrate, but we’ve never talked about the immune component of food sensitivities and food you know hay fever, rashes, acne that kind of thing. All of that, a lot of times, is actually immune signaling cytokines that are coming out of the gut going to this other body part. It might be your face. It might be your brain could be somewhere else. And so paraprobiotics are emerging as one of the coolest, best new tools that you could add into a protocol like that and have again, almost immediate within a week or two when you get the dosage right, improvements in whatever your issue, whether it’s acne, rashes, brain fog, or food sensitivities. When you add that all in now we’re changing the way the food is being broken down. Therefore, the mast cells and everything don’t see the same thing they’ve always been seeing. We’re increasing the mucus thickness.

We’re decreasing leaky gut, we’re increasing microbiome diversity with butyrate, and then we’re taking Holo Immune, which is dead probiotics. And they’re helping the immune system be like, “Okay, it’s cool you know, we don’t have to react that way. We’ll change our patterns.” And then if there’s any extra histamine that’s being sent out because you have a genetic issue or you let’s say you wanted some alcohol or some cheese like, there’s nothing wrong with that every once in a while, take a few extra DAO HistaHarmony. And that’s kind of how I begin to see a full picture of rebuilding someone’s body such that a couple months of that and I would expect your diet to be extraordinarily diverse, even if you’re already, even if you’re only on like five foods right now. That’s common for our company is we see extraordinarily difficult cases. And a lot of these folks are on five, seven foods they have full-on histamine reactions every single day. And we can see over 60, 90, 120 days quickly in a protocol like that quickly expanding their horizons, their capacity to deal with the world, with pollen, with food, and becoming much more of a normal human experience again.

Katie: I love that. And I love your point about we don’t want a strong immune system. We want a balanced immune system. I think that also applies to a lot of areas of life, but I love that point. I think that we often overlook that. It’s always the “more, better, stronger” kind of mentality. And I absolutely love learning from you.
Like, as always, our time flies by. I could talk to you for hours and days, so we’ll have to have more future conversations. But Steven, I’ve learned so much in this, and I felt like this was already a topic I understood somewhat. So thank you so much for everything that you’ve shared, for your deep knowledge and your passion for helping people.
And I’ll make sure we put links to everything we talked about also in the show notes at barbaraoneill.online for any of you guys listening on the go. But Steven, for this episode, thank you so much for the time. This was incredible.

Steven: Oh, thank you so much, Katie. And we do have a coupon code for your listeners. So hopefully they’ll take advantage of that if they want to try any of the products. And if you’re just confused because you’re like, “Dude, you talk too fast, it’s too scientific” we have all U.S.-based, extraordinarily trained health coaches.

They most, they have nutritionist degrees and all that like, they’re extraordinarily trained. They’re also trained by me. You can call our 1-888 number. Any purchase gets you a free health coaching call. So we try to make this as empowering as possible so that you as moms, as dads, whoever you are can really just step into the same knowledge that I’m trying to express today.

Katie: I love that. Well, I will make sure that coupon code and that number are in the show notes as well. But Steven, thank you so much, and thank you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.