I had allergies for YEARS! Every Spring the runny nose, congestion, sneezing and coughing would roar it’s ugly head. I would stock up on not just antihistamines but the kind you have to get behind the counter…you know, the kind you have to ask the Pharmacist for. Every year I would have to take days off from work due to these nasty symptoms. That is until one year when it just stopped. I wondered…why am I not getting allergies? It turns out it was because I had recently been addressing my gut health.

Allergies Start in the Gut?

Some people are surprised to learn that allergies start in the gut – especially when our symptoms are usually respiratory-related (sneezing, coughing, running nose). One of the main reasons for this is leaky gut.

You’ve probably heard this term before. It is responsible for many of our ailments but one of them is allergies! Leaky gut, or gut permeability, is when our gut’s cell linings are loose, letting food pass through the wall and into our bloodstream. Once those food particles enter the blood stream, our body perceives it as a foreign threat. When this happens, your body produces histamine.

So the histamine produced in response to the leaky gut, AND the histamine introduced by environmental allergies (think: pollen), is enough to tip your body’s histamine load over the bucket and you get symptoms: sneezing, runny nose, itching, coughing.

I Can Just Take Claritin For That!

Antihistamines may provide short-term relief, but they also come with side effects – for many people, they cause dehydration, brain fog, headaches, constipation, and next- day fatigue. They also reduce stomach acid and alter our stomach PH levels, which is not good for digestive function.

I would rather you get to the root cause of your allergies and not just take something to mask the symptoms.

The good news is, there are natural ways to support your body’s overproduction of histamine, such as addressing leaky gut. Check out my next email soon for more.