Histamine issues can be very insidious. They can sneak up on us before we even realize that they are setting a trap to ambush us. And sometimes we wonder why we're having problems, when we believe that we are doing everything right.
Take slow cooking in a crock pot, for example. While we're all aware that slow thawing can cause histamine problems, how about slow cooking? Well, apparently it can carry the same risks. Just think about it . . . it takes a long time for a crock pot to get the food up to a temperature at which bacteria and or yeasts cannot function. And all that while, histamine development is optimal, due to the warm, moist conditions in the crock pot.
You may recall that almost a month ago, I posted in another thread (post number 10 in the thread at the following link), about an apparent histamine reaction to some chicken soup that had been stored in the refrigerator for a few days. At the time, I blamed the reaction on several days of storage at refrigerator temperatures. It didn't dawn on me until today that the real problem was probably due to the fact that the chicken soup was cooked in a crock pot, thus setting up the soup for optimal histamine propagation.
http://www.perskyfarms.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19404
The soup was an accident waiting to happen, because it was inadvertently designed to optimize the potential for histamine development. The reason why heating time is so important can be found in the fact that once histamine is created, it cannot be destroyed (by ordinary cooking temperatures). Therefore, if we generate histamine before the food gets up to a safe cooking temperature, the histamine will all still be there after cooking is completed. Nothing that we can safely do to the food later, can remove it. And since the process is cumulative, whenever more histamine is created, it's added to the total, but none of it can ever be removed. Any engineers in the group will recognize this as an analogue of entropy — entropy is always increasing.
But we learn by making mistakes, and the bigger the mistake, the easier it is to see where we went wrong. Since I don't normally have histamine problems due to eating leftovers, something about this scenario didn't smell right, and today the reason finally dawned on me. Crock pot cooking and treating histamine sensitivity are incongruent.
A search of the internet turned up someone who apparently agrees with me. I found the thread at the following link on a discussion board that's apparently frequented by people who have systemic mastocytosis. Systemic mastocytosis is the ultimate mast cell/histamine problem. Go down to post number 6 (response number 5 to the question):
Does crockpot cooking increase histamines?
This may also explain why many of us seem to have problems with bone broths. Apparently bone broth is a high histamine food.
http://paleohacks.com/questions/111707/ ... u-eat.html
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