4 things you need for long term allergy relief

Depending on what part of the world you are in right now, allergy season may be coming or going.

If you've been suffering from allergies, these symptoms may be all too familiar to you:

• headaches
• migraines
• difficulty falling asleep
• vomiting
• nausea
• swollen eyes, lips, or face
• sneezing
• chest tightness
• abdominal cramps
• skin issues/manifestations

Our body can eliminate histamines. However, it may be challenging to eliminate these enzymes if your genes are coded to a certain allergic predisposition.

As my friend, Robyn, said in this episode of the Less Stressed Life podcast, a predisposition is not the only factor determining your tendency to get allergies. The environment you are in right now also plays a crucial role in triggering any allergic reactions. 

The weather, the food you eat, the condition of your workspace, the skin products you put on, etc., are all possible triggers.

A bit of biased opinion on allergies: when your gut is experiencing bacterial imbalances, your body's ability to deal with histamines is also affected. 

Family history and the environment you live in are just some of the factors I take into consideration when working with my clients. I want to make sure our conversation paints a bigger picture of why these symptoms are manifesting. 

You need to assess your goal. What do you want to do? Help your body manage histamines better? Or block it?

Taking anti-histamines like Zyrtec, Benadryl, or the like will help you block histamines. Still, if you're more interested in managing how your body deals with histamines, then these ingredients will help modulate your body's response.

1. Quercetin.  
   Quercetin is a popular flavonoid found in elderberries, blueberries, parsley, etc. Known for the anti-inflammatory effect it has but it seems to help the body manage histamine. Quercetin works synergistically with Vitamin C. 
   
   
2. Hesperetin.  A bioflavonoid similar to Quercetin and found in citruses. In doses of 600 mg, Hesperetin is found to provide allergy relief. Some people, though, would need a higher dose.
   
   
3. Epicor "Saccharomyces cerevisiae."  Epicor "Saccharomyces cerevisiae." It is a patented product that's kind of hard to describe. Basically, a sort of fermented yeast that is shown to boost immune health.  
   
   
4. Indian Tinospora.Indian Tinospora is popularly used in Ayurveda. Recently discovered to have medicinal properties against diabetes, allergies, malaria, etc., it is reported to have an 83% effect on sneezing relief and 69% effectiveness in relieving sinus discharge.

A word of caution, supplementation should be a personalized process. The dosage you get will be different from your friend's or sister's.  If you have any doubts, please consult an expert.

Also, before you start shopping for supplements like those given above, you have to consider that not all supplements you see on Amazon are of high quality.  

Listen to Episode 062 of the Less Stressed Life podcast where I dive in a little bit deeper into these 4 must-haves for natural allergy relief.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the less stressed life podcast. This is your host, Krista Bigler, private practice, integrative nutritionist, helping people across the U S reverse digestive issues, eczema, and auto-immunity via phone and video consult to learn more, visit less stress, nutrition.com now onto the show.

So depending on where you live, it is either coming into or just finishing allergy season. And I realized before I take anyone on as a client, I always have a conversation with them first to understand things. And I realized I was explaining the mechanism of what happens when you have allergies so much that I am wanting to share it with you because not too long ago, I posted about it on Facebook and Instagram, and it was a kind of popular post. So let's talk about natural remedies for allergies and how do you get to the root cause to help your body manage allergies better? So, first of all, I actually don't have any data on this, but is it just me, or does it seem like allergies are more prevalent than maybe they used to be, and maybe I'm wrong about that, but it feels like, and maybe I live in a black hole where I see this all the time.

It feels like allergies are kind of rampant. So allergies are going to have a little bit of a genetic component. So if you are a parents had allergies, you might have a little bit more of a predisposition to out allergic type diseases. Why is that? Because there are a couple of enzymes, or I'm sorry, enzymes are they work because your genes kind of make them work, right? Genes like genetic code. So you get your genes from your parents, your biological parents to get a set from kind of either side sort of, kind of. So those genes in code for the enzymes to work properly. Does that make sense? So it's kind of like, it pulls the trigger and then the enzyme fires essentially. And so if you have poor genes or insufficient or suboptimal genes for Dao, and HNMT, those are the two genes that really code for allergies, the enzyme that breaks down the stuff that's, accessive in allergies, then maybe you're going to be a little bit more of a disadvantage, or you might be a little more likely to have allergies, but like so many things, it's sort of a perfect storm, right?

And so what's actually going on in your actual life because genetics are a tendency, but they're not a destiny. Right. As my friend Robin says in her episode about genetics. And so why do we let's look at the background, right? So we kind of sorta know what histamine is, right? Because we know what anti-histamines are, Zyrtec, Benadryl, et cetera. And so histamine is this normal thing that our body should be able to eliminate on its own. Histamine is just a neuro-transmitter. That means it's a natural chemical messenger that communicates messages from your brain to your body. It impacts visa, dilations, a swelling that'll cause redness and inflammatory reactions as your blood cells try to attack and find the invader. So your body produces a certain amount of it. Activity changes it. Um, temperature can change it. B environment can change it, which is why it's such a, it's a topic on people's minds.

Food's gonna affect it. All these things contribute to your histamine bucket. So let's talk about things like symptoms of this. Aside from allergies that can be headaches and migraines. It can be difficulty falling asleep. It can be maybe nausea, vomiting. Now be kind of extreme abdominal cramps. I just talked to someone earlier today who is experiencing some flushing. And by this time I know that it's, that it's quite a bit more significant. We see it in hives all the time, right? I work with a lot of skin issues and tissues falling so on the skin. So I see a lot of skin manifestations of this going on. So how do you get rid of it? So your body should be able to get rid of it on its own, but something standing in the way, right? So you have these genes that encode these enzymes to get rid of it.

But more importantly, and again, little biased work with a lot of gut imbalances and bacterial imbalances that cause this when bacterias and balanced enzymes don't work very well. So that means the worst shape that your gut is in whether you have digestive symptoms or it's presenting as something else like autoimmunity, like a headache, like fatigue, like joint pain, like sinus congestion, like throat clearing. I mean, whatever the symptom is, it doesn't necessarily present in a digestive way, but your gut, your gut, obviously bacteria control a lot of things. And so when you've got an imbalance of bacteria, those enzymes aren't going to work very well. And so that if people have bad allergies, guess what? I bet they also have bad periods, right? Bad cramps, et cetera. So that's another story for another day, but it all links together. And then how things break down and are eliminated.

So whenever I'm working on, I like to help people manage their allergies long-term. And so we work on how to improve the body's ability for those enzymes to break down the histamines and to excrete them. But meanwhile, there are some things that you can use to help your body manage or modulator histamine a little bit better. Now, do I think that these are like long-term as dressing the root cause? Not necessarily, but they're helpers, right? So they're helpers. And so I use a couple of products, pretty commonly. Let's talk about the ingredients in them, and then I can give you the ingredient or the product names. And some of them are food with different compounds in them. So let's talk about it. So here's some ingredients that are known to help, uh, modulators to be in or help our body manage histamines or allergy responses better.

Cause remember it's more of a bucket. So Quercetine a very popular one. It's a, flavonoid a natural compound already found in elderberries blueberries, parsley, pomegranate, and a lot of other things it's overall anti-inflammatory, but it seems to help your body manage histamine better. I like to use it in a combo from food sources or by using homemade elderberry every day to make elderberry syrup, you know, uh, serve as a really loose term because it's not really syrupy. You basically boil and simmer elderberries for a long time. And then you can afford to take it every day because you're not probably going to find a store-bought one that's very inexpensive expensive. It works really synergistically with vitamin C, which is also in adult elderberries right? So we can get kind of high-dose course that in multiple places you can get it from fennel, ginger. Those are both big course atten uh, sources, et cetera.

Another ingredient is hesperetin which is similar to course attendance. Another bioflavonoid found in citruses that's found to provide allergy relief, um, in doses of a hundred to 600 milligrams. So the product I'm going to recommend that has, hesperetin in it has a hundred milligrams in two caps. And I said that the good doses between 106 hundred, so this might mean that more people, some people are going to need a higher dose, right? Everyone's load of this and, or severity of it is a little bit different and there's not really a one size fits all it's. These are just sort of kind of guidelines. Another one in this product is Epicor from Saccharomyces cerevisiae, say, this is one of those patented products. It's kind of hard to describe. Basically it is kind of a fermented yeast product that some company has patented, um, where it's been shown to boost immune health and keep your immune system just up.

So it has also shown in studies reduction in allergy symptoms compared to placebo at doses of 500 milligrams. All right. Finally, Indian Tinto, Spira, T I N S P O R a in one small study of, um, of participants. 83% of them had complete relief from sneezing. 69% of people had a relief of sinus discharge and 61% from stuffiness. This is, these are significant numbers in literature, honestly, over the placebo group who reported the exact opposite. They didn't have any improvement. And in, in research, usually they're just using one ingredient. So just this one ingredient was doing that, which is pretty impressive, another product. So this product that I was just talking about has hesperetin and Epicor and Indian todo spur. And it also has apples, which Apple extract is known also for its anti-histamine properties. It is a, just obviously a fruit that's rich in antioxidants.

Um, it contains quercetine and vitamin C, which helps combat mast cells and histamine from different angles. So that's also in this product, this product is called Pure Encapsulations allergy essentials. I find that people tend to need about one to six of them. Um, so someone asked me one time, do I need to continue taking this? Or can I go back to my Zyrtec? And I said, it just depends on what your goal is. If you want to help your body manage histamine better on its own, then keep taking this. And if you just want to block it and use an anti-histamine blocker, then use Zyrtec, right? So just a quick public service that I always exercise caution when ordering any supplements from Amazon, because anyone can set up a shop on Amazon. So you don't know if you're getting the high quality or authentic, uh, the authentic product, which is a problem with some brands, more than others, most healthcare practitioners at this point, use high quality supplement.

Dispensary's online to make things easier for their clients. You can access that from my website, Krista bigler.com or get it wherever you want. It doesn't matter to me another product that works for different people. So sometimes I've had people order both and see which one works better for them is dehisced from orthomolecular. This one's kind of popular. It's got a nice dose of vitamin C with the course of 10, which we know work synergistically. It's got some stinging nettle, which stinging nettle is, is, uh, in extract form has been shown to inhibit inflammatory mediators called prostaglandins that are related to that histamine response. Just got a really high dose of both course attend and stinging nettle. It's got an enzyme that helps break things down and it's got just a touch of inositol. Cystine very low dose of NSP it'll cystine, which is a precursor to one of the most important anti-oxidants in the liver.

Uh, and it has been known to help with mood immune system and sinus drainage, but again, very, very small, just supportive amount, uh, in this product. So it's, uh, it's a pretty darn small amount. Now, if your histamine bucket is really full because the environment is high and the foods that are really high in histamine are kind of like a Christmas cheese platter. It's kind of like dairy and nuts and cured meats and dried meats, et cetera, dried foods, cured foods, soured foods. So basically cheese cured meats, et cetera, and a few veggies, different ones and nuts. Then it's going to be hard to kind of manage it, right? So if you put more in, it's hard to get it out. If your body isn't digesting it for lack of a better word and eliminating it properly. So for me, the real root causes doing that, but this is definitely helpful for helping your body overall, be able to manage histamine a little bit more on its own.

And that is kind of the mechanism of action for a lot of herbs. They try to help your body do things a little bit better on their own. It really depends on what you're using them for, uh, as to how they work. But in this situation, it doesn't hurt to try them out. Hopefully that episode wasn't too disjointed. I know it was just a short little Diddy, but I wanted to be able to get that information out to you in case it's helpful while allergy season is still in the swing, I'll see you next week on the less stress life podcast. Hey, and if you haven't shared this with a friend yet, now's a good time go to the share button and send it over to a friend that you love or that could benefit from this episode. See you soon.

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