YouTube lecture by Dr. Paul Andersen (part of a mast cell activation series) outlining five foundational holistic approaches to help manage mast cell activation syndrome: 1) histamine modulation (low-histamine diet plus supporting three metabolic clearance pathways: N-acetylation via vitamin B5, DAO supported by vitamin C/B6/magnesium/copper or DAO supplements, and methylation/MAO pathway supported by P5P/magnesium/vitamin C and thiamine to avoid toxic intermediates), 2) vitamin D with K2 for immunomodulation and calcium handling, 3) curcumin as an anti-inflammatory immunomodulator, 4) flavonoids/bioflavonoids (e.g., quercetin, rutin, hesperidin) and drug analogs like cromolyn, and 5) low-dose naltrexone (prescription required). The speaker repeatedly frames recommendations as informational (not medical advice) and points to show-notes/links for papers and products (e.g., Seeking Health).
Chapters
So it's a busy pathway and if your histamine is all bottled up as methyl histamine and your MAO is slow because maybe you've got more estrogen than your body can handle or you're trying to get rid of your catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, etc. Everybody's trying to get out this one pathway. 5 heavy hitter Mast cell activation treatments. We'll go through those in just a moment. Want to thank you for listening. This is in our mast cell activation and mast cell disease series. There's a whole number of videos we're going to link to them, etc. We've already done some, we're doing a bunch more. But what is the best place for you to start when you're looking at getting mast cell activation a little bit more under control? Now, first caveat is obviously there's many other things that need to be done, other places to look. We're going to talk about those individually, but if you don't have these initial bases covered, you may wind up with not enough immunomodulation at the area with sort of ground zero with your mast cells. And so that's what I really want to get through with these five. So the five are histamine modulation, vitamin D and K2 together, curcumin, flavonoids and then low dose naltrexone. So I want to go through each of those with you right now. Now obviously histamine is a big player. It's not the only players, a lot of players. And I'll show in another section a little chart about all the players in mast cell problems. But histamine is a big one. So there's, this is beyond the drugs. Okay, so we can give you drugs that will block histamine 1 and histamine 2 receptors. We can do other things with drugs with histamine. But what I'm talking about here is what can you do with yourself with your own body to help your body do two things? One is to have less histamine coming in. The other is to metabolize the histamine out of your body more efficiently. So if I have less going in, that's like taking some bricks off to load. And if I have more being metabolized away, I have less histamine buildup, less histamine triggering systeming. The only problem? No, but it's a big problem. So first thing is what's coming in you can just look up very easily online, low histamine diet or high histamine foods, whichever we want to look at it. And as a way to get the ball rolling, sometimes it's really helpful to just take high histamine foods out of your diet if you possibly can, because then you have less coming in. Now, if you have touchy, angry aggravated mast cells, that's not going to cur cure everything, but it'll slow it down for you. So that's really important to keep in mind. So that's the supply side, the elimination side. We want to remember that histamine has three ways out. Now, I'm also going to put a link down below. We've got a bunch of other mast cell sections and one is specifically about histamine. We'll get more into this, but I just want to go through the three ways out of your body for histamine. And so they, they involve three pathways. Two of them are fairly straightforward, meaning there's pretty much just one enzyme in the way and then the histamine can leave. And those two are NAT or N acetyltransferase, which is supported by vitamin B5 or pantothenic acid. And that we often look at as sort of the safety relief valve for histamine. A lot of people don't realize they have this N acetyl transferase, this acetylation step to get rid of histamine. And they do. And it's a separate pathway from the other two. So it's another way to help build up. So although this, obviously you looked at the card, this is not medical advice, it's just what we do and what we found. And you should talk to your healthcare provider. It is worth Remembering that vitamin B5 is supportive there. And so we will often start people, especially if they're very sensitive on just vitamin B5, and then work our way around the next is going to be the diamine oxidase. The DAO pathway used to be called histaminase, but we call it DAO DAO now. And you've heard probably about supplements for either supporting DAO or DAO supplements or maybe even probiotics that help support histamine breakdown. There's a company that, that we use with patients have no financial connection. I get nothing for saying this other than they have very high quality supplements and you can look them up online called Seeking Health. And they do a lot with a lot of histamine metabolism things. And their, their products around DAO and histamine metabolism are very, very good. Again, no connection to them. They're Just a very good manufacturer. So the DAO, so you've got NAT going up one way, vitamin B5, DAO going over here. It's largely supported by vitamin C, B6, magnesium and copper. But you can also take DAO. And then there's the hard one, the long one. So that's the histamine and methyltransferase and that one goes through a bunch of steps. But for those of you who have ever tried to take a methyl supplied Support like methyl B12 or methylfolate, pre methylated folic acid or B12 and your histamine or your mast cell symptoms got worse, what happens is you take histamine, you methylate it with the methyl B12 or the methylfolate it goes down, becomes what? Methyl histamine, which is, I call it evil histamine. It's very toxic and it will bind your receptors harder. If you can't get to step two in the HMNT pathway, then you're going to get stuck with methyl histamine. It's going to make everything worse. So it's not that methyl donors are bad, it's just for some people, they need the outlet to be opened up. Sometimes by supporting DAO and nat, that happens, but usually what happens is we methylate really well and then we get to, we get bottlenecked up at mao. Monoamine oxidase, which is the cousin of dao, monoamine oxidase is used by histamine, it's used by dopamine, by norepinephrine, by a whole bunch of other chemicals like also estrogen, et cetera, to get out of the body. So it's a busy pathway. And if your histamine is all bottled up as MET ethyl histamine and your MAO is slow because maybe you've got more estrogen than your body can handle, or you're trying to get rid of your catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, etc. Everybody's trying to get out this one pathway that is supported, much like Dao, its cousin, by B6 and magnesium and a little bit vitamin C. So we usually give people P5P, the active form of B6 and magnesium and some vitamin C to help support that. But then there's one more step and you don't want to just run it through MAO and then have it get stuck. Because if you get through mao, you get a histamine aldehyde. Histamine aldehyde is a different type of toxicity in your body than Methyl histamine or plain histamine. With histamines you feel your mast cells activate, et cetera. Right. When you get to histamine aldehyde, it's more of a brain thing, you'll feel very toxic, you can feel hungover, you can get your brain fog aggravated. And the histamine aldehyde step largely uses vitamin B1 or thiamine. And a lot of people like remember Nat uses B5. We don't think of B5 with mast cell and allergy. But super important, B1 is used to get a lot of stuff out of the body. And so again B1 becomes critically important. The other two, you heard it a few steps are P5P or the active form of B6, magnesium and vitamin C of course that work in there together. So that's the histamine. So thing lower what's coming in through your diet, increase what's leaving through these three pathways. It's a help, it's not a cure, it's a help. Vitamin D and K2. Vitamin D is a master immunomodulator. We want it to be in the normal range. I usually like to see it in about the upper third of the normal range. But we give it with vitamin K2 because in the body they work together. Now most of us remember, you know, probably from grade school, like vitamin D is good for your bones and your teeth and stuff because of calcium, right? Well, K2 is another fat soluble vitamin that keeps vitamin D from putting calcium into the wrong direction so your body can get calcium in the wrong places. K2 balances that. It does it by manipulation of enzymes which is what everything is pretty much. But now you get supplements with the DK2 and those are really great for maintenance. Okay, most people are on to taking vitamin D. Just switch over to DK2. That's what we tell our patients. And it allows you have this immunomodulation and the manipulation of the enzymes in a more efficient manner. Number three is curcumin. I'll put a link to a paper in the show notes where curcumin has been helpful. Very useful. It's helpful at lowering. So it's sort of a like vitamin D, it's sort of a master immunomodulator in mast cell problems you are unmodulated in your immune system. So curcumin helps not only to bring modulation to the immune system but also to calm down some of the inflammatory chemistry that mast cell activation will trigger. And then the last one is low dose naltrexone. We've mentioned that before. It's a drug. You have to have a prescriber for that. Lotus naltrexone is very, very useful. I'll put a couple of links to it down below. And anyone prescribing, well, pretty much anyone in the integrative naturopathic world is going to know about Lotus naltrexone. They may. It's actually got some case reports and things around it with mast cell activation. And I said that was the last one, but that was only four now, wasn't it? So the last one is the flavonoids and bioflavonoids. Now there's drug versions of these like cromolyn, chromoly and sodium. And then there's natural things like supplement forms like quercetin and rut and hesperidin and other bioflavonoids. They're kind of what keeps the, the fruiting body or the reproductive body of the plant from becoming oxidized. So when we put them in the human body, they calm mast cell activation down, which is actually kind of cool and useful. Now do keep in mind these things are not the end all be are. They're not a cure. But there are things that people will often, you know, write in and say, Look, I've got 500 things I've been told is good for my mast cell. You know, what's the core, what's the base? We got these five and then we can work our way out. All right, well, I'm Dr. Paul Andersen for Medicine Health. Want to thank you for listening. Remember, this is not medical advice. This is information for you to use, share with your healthcare providers. Get your healthcare advice from a healthcare provider. Go over and check us out on YouTube. If you're not watching on YouTube right now, please like share, subscribe, do notifications, comment. That really helps us in the algorithm. And if you get lost ever, just go to dranow.coM-R-A N-O-W.com you can sign up for our our newsletters. There you can get access to the links to all the other websites and the YouTube and all the pod burners. And I really want to thank you for listening and I will see you all at the next segment.
