Histamines are a chemical your immune system has in its tool box of preparedness to deal with invasion of unwelcome bits that cause reaction in your body, and for good reason. They envelop invasive particles, accepted as ‘allergens’ making them unable to do harm. Great if the result is an improvement but not great if they cause challenges for your quality of life in the form of sneezing, runny nose and asthma or even less obvious ways like causing you to sleep less.
Welcome to Spring and Rhinitis; hay fever, allergies, followed
by anti-histamines; medicines that ask your immune system to calm the
histamines down. It sounds ludicrous but, sometimes histamines overreact to
benign and usually harmless stimuli, mistaking them for more malicious ones and
well, snot and runny eyes are the unfortunate result. I have thought about the
idea of meditating on calming my histamines down with my mind instead of buying
anti-histamines with no clear result but something that does seem to be a good
alternative is remedying gut microbiome, which is reported to be where 70% of
our immune system operates from.
In a recent study, improved gut
health; the cultures of bacteria that develop the food you eat into usable
energy, found that symptoms caused by pollen were significantly reduced when
patients were given probiotics containing lactobacillus
gasseri, bifidobacterium bifidum
and bifidobacterium longum. These
probiotics are readily available in capsule and dry oral applications, and
while there is nothing wrong with taking probiotic medicines, in fact they are
measurably beneficial and highly recommended, fermented beverage, kefir,
is a much tastier and enjoyable way to deliver these very cultures.
Kefir is a naturally fermented
food that transforms sugars and lactose in water or milk and according to healthline.com "...[milk] Kefir is low in lactose
because its lactic acid bacteria have already pre-digested the lactose. People
who have lactose intolerance can often drink kefir without problems". This reinforces the notion that letting
micro-organisms do the work of making sure chemicals and nutrients are fit for
our body's best condition, so that our histamines can be saved for real
threats, is plausible. Reinforcing our immune system through providing the
right cultures for our gut microbiome is a direct and healthy intervention that
can reduce the effects of your environment from the inside.
Try as little as 40ml per
day of this delicious drink and see for yourself if there is any truth in these
growing number of studies supporting gut health as the centre of operations,
working to keep us healthy and avoid chronic diseases. Comment below on your
kefir experience, we would love to hear from you!
You can ferment your own
water or milk kefir with kefir grains fresh or dried from NUmeSa Foods from
their online store and grow your own life changing brews! Read this previous blog to find out how.
Or if you are like me and
prefer to have it delivered you can buy bottled kefir from the small factory in
Pretoria supplying health food stores country wide, right here.
We at Numesa believe that a healthy tummy means a happy life!
Written by Viv
Brown
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