The Top 5 Headache Triggers and 1 Natural Headache Remedy

Hey, my future of health now peeps. It's Ben Greenfield and I'm up here in Whistler, bc, Canada, about to go for a beautiful bike ride. But before I do, I wanted to tell you a little bit about something that's been on my mind recently, and that is headaches. It's been on my mind because my wife's been dealing with these. So I've had to kind of dig in and research a little bit into what's going on. And it turns out that a lot of other people deal with headaches too. And I don't know about you, but when I have a headache, I feel like I'm out of control of what's going on inside my body, specifically inside my head. It's like some alien has taken over my skull and I'm not able to actually I'm not able to control the situation. It can be frustrating, can be painful, can drain your energy levels. So today I'm going to tell you the top five things that I've discovered that are actually common headache triggers that kind of tend to fly under the radar. I'm also not going to leave you hanging because I'm going to tell you the one thing that I've found to be a common deficiency in people who struggle with headaches, especially people who struggle with migraines. Sound good? Alright, cool. Let's jump right in. So the first thing, and this might come as no surprise to you, is monosodium glutamate msg. That's right, that thing that you'll find a lot of times in Chinese foods as well as soups, stews, packaged foods. You'd actually be surprised if you started looking at the labels of a lot of foods, how many things have MSG in them, especially quote unquote healthy, prepackaged soups, stews, things like that. Even some of your favorite healthy Asian restaurants that might actually serve up some pretty good fresh vegetables, fresh meats, things of that nature. They add monosodium glutamate and frankly a lot of people have sensitivity, sensitivities to that. So MSG is number one. Okay. The next thing is cheese. Cheese has something called tyramines in it and a lot of people have sensitivities to the tyramines and cheese. Up to 15% of folks walking around with headaches might be getting that headache because of cheese from primarily soft cheese or hard cheese, dairy sources. Okay? So you can eat dairy a lot of the time, but cheese tends to be an issue. So that's number two. So we've Got MSG and we've got cheese. The next thing is caffeine. Now, caffeine causes a vasoconstriction to some of the muscles and the blood that goes up to your head and it can be a real trigger. And again, caffeine can sneak in. And everything from coffees to teas to chocolates tends to be a real, real issue though, in terms of it being a headache trigger. So msg, caffeine, cheese, the next one's going to disappoint you a little bit, but it has levels of what's called fat, phenylethylamine in it, similar to the tyramines in cheese. It's chocolate. I know it's a big bummer, but chocolate can be a big headache trigger for a lot of folks. And it's not just due to the caffeine, it's due to some other things in chocolate as well. So chocolate is another one to look out for. And the last one, the biggest one on the list in terms of it being the highest contributor to headaches. This might also come as no surprise to you, even when it's not in excess alcohol. And it's because of the sulfites that are used as common preservatives in everything from wine to beer to even some hard alcohols. So alcohol is another biggie too. Alright, so we've got alcohol, chocolate, caffeine, cheese and msg. What I would recommend you do is you start keeping track of your diet. Start writing down what you're eating, and that's a really, really good way, because then when you get a headache, you'll be able to scroll back to your diet logs and look and see what probably caused it. Now, like I mentioned, I'm not going to leave you hanging because there's one thing, one deficiency in a lot of people's diet that, if deficient, has been known to contribute to headaches in a lot of folks. And your brain can specifically have a deficiency in this one mineral and it's magnesium. And sure, you can get magnesium from seeds, from nuts, even ironically, from chocolate. But the thing about magnesium is that the levels that you get from a lot of natural food sources don't touch the levels that you actually need if you're deficient and if you're suffering from headaches because of that deficiency. So my recommendation is you go hunt down a good magnesium source. Some of the better absorbed sources are magnesium citrate, magnesium glycinate and magnesium taurate. And you're looking in most cases at needing to get magnesium levels. I've found some people around 300 milligrams. Some folks can tolerate up to 1,000 milligrams. But you basically take as much magnesium as you can handle until you and this is not a pleasant scenario, get loose stool. When you get loose stool, you back off. Some folks do better with citrate, some with taurate, some with glycinate. Kind of depends. It's not hard to find magnesium these days in health food stores or even online. And magnesium, surprisingly, is the number one thing that you can kind of add into your diet to get rid of those headaches, in addition to eliminating. Say it with me. Cheese, chocolate, caffeine, msg and alcohol. All right. I'm Ben Greenfield. I hope that was helpful, and I wish you the best of luck in getting rid of those pounding headaches. All right. Have a great healthy week.