Dr. Elizabeth Boham

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367 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 1 Dec

Dr. Elizabeth Boham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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The Dr. Hyman Show · Mold, Lyme, Gut Health, and the Mystery of Histamine Intolerance · 21 Apr 2025 podcast

And then, again, I think one of the tests for me is dermatographism. I find that a very helpful clinical test to determine if a person's mast cells in interstitial spaces are overly reactive and releasing lots of histamine.

Yes. Yeah.

Yes. So DAO is a diamine oxidase. So this is an enzyme that our body has and it helps to break down histamine. So histamine has to be, you know, consumed, it's used, and then it has to be detoxified. And if this enzyme is lacking in a person for whatever reasons, the enzyme may be turned off. you will have problems with detoxifying histamine, especially in the gut.

And there are enzyme products that you can use, DAO enzymes that you can use, that patients respond very, very well to this.

Absolutely, yeah.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. And then, you know, you can use antihistamines. And the other thing, we had another podcast earlier on migraines. And this is, I found this also very interesting, is one of the things that is a histamine blocker is butterbur. And Butterbur is used in migraines. And the reason why Butterbur works in migraines is it actually is working on an antihistamine level.

Because you can get an allergic brain, if you will. We know about that where you get fuzzy in the head and you can get headaches and things like that. So excess amounts of histamine has an impact on the brain. Yeah.

Yeah, so basically the way to think about it is bacteria produce histamine. So if you have food that's old, if you have food that's sitting in the refrigerator for a couple of days, guess what happens? The bacteria actually break down histidine, the amino acid, into histamines.

Leftovers, exactly. Leftovers, exactly.

And then fermented foods. Fermented foods are fermented by bacteria. So anytime we have food that's old or fermented, things like Parmesan cheese, aged meats, et cetera, cured meats, et cetera, they have high histamine and that's part of the fermentation process.

Exactly. And this is where these really good foods in someone who has histamine intolerance is like putting gasoline on a fire. And they'll say, well, I'm getting worse. It's like, well, no, you should be getting worse. These are good foods for you. No, you have histamine problems.

It's not forever. That's the thing is I think you're absolutely right. Like an elimination diet is not something that you do forever. And a low histamine diet is also something that you don't necessarily have to do forever. And I think that the key thing is really working with a really good

well-trained, experienced functional medicine nutritionists who can help you navigate all of the nuances of what to eat, what to avoid, what to take in terms of supplements can be very, very helpful.

Well, you bring up an interesting thing because, you know, as I have seen more and more patients, and I think we are seeing more patients who have, you know, histamine intolerance, call it mast cell activation syndrome, to what degree, is there are certain individuals who can be a little bit more predisposed towards this.

So people who have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, you know, the hypermobile people can actually have, for whatever reasons, will have a higher incidence of histamine intolerance. The other thing in the case I recently had was a patient who came in to me with severe mast cell activation syndrome.

It was on a whole bunch of different medicines, including chromium, which we talked about earlier, to decrease food reactions to histamine. And I saw the patient, and he gave a very interesting history. He had this skin lesion, which sort of like morphed into this almost like an ulcer. scarring type ulcerated lesion on his back area.

He saw multiple dermatologists, had a biopsy, had part of the area removed, and was ultimately diagnosed with some type of form of a scleroderma, sort of like a malignant scleroderma, which is sort of interesting and like, oh, what's that related to? But he was also having all of these histamine type reactions.

And then when I asked him a bunch of questions, I started thinking about, well, guess what? Lyme disease is also associated with histamine intolerance because Lyme bacteria resides in the connective tissues in the body. It sort of hides there.

And that in turn can actually activate those mast cells, which mast cells are the first line defense or one of the first lines of defense against infectious agents. And when I asked him, because he had a lot of fatigue and brain fog type symptoms too, but maybe that was related to something else. So I asked him about potential exposure.

So lo and behold, he ended up having a low CD57 count, which is oftentimes a marker. It's not diagnostic of Lyme, but it tells you that the immune system is not working so well. And when I did advanced testing on him, he had actually had conventional lab testing. I think we talked about that in another podcast, how regular conventional lab testing for Lyme disease is not that helpful.

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