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Migraine Food Triggers: An Introduction

We’ve all heard about foods that are potential migraine triggers and many of us have tried avoiding those foods to some degree.

Migraine food triggers are hard to identify

Unfortunately, individual triggers can be elusive. Figuring out which foods are problematic for you can be maddening. Some people have no food triggers at all, while others have so many food triggers that every meal triggers a migraine. The latter describes me.

Trying elimination diets

I have tried a variety of elimination diets – avoiding typical migraine triggers, gluten, dairy, and a whole list of foods that allergy testing showed were problematic for me – for different lengths of time and still couldn’t figure out what my food triggers were.

Still, I knew I had to have some issue with food because I always felt worse after I ate. It took work and I still have some fine-tuning to do, but I’ve made tremendous progress. Last year was the best year I’ve had in more than 12 years.

Learning more about food triggers

For me, the biggest culprit is one that gets almost no attention in the migraine world: dietary histamine. Figuring that out was arduous (and involved a stint into malnutrition), but it also taught me a ton about food triggers - and that there are safe and easier ways to sleuth them out than my original approach.

This is the start of a series on migraine and food triggers. Some of the topics I’ll address include:

Have other questions I haven't mentioned? Please leave them in the comments and I'll do my best to cover them in the series.

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This article represents the opinions, thoughts, and experiences of the author; none of this content has been paid for by any advertiser. The Migraine.com team does not recommend or endorse any products or treatments discussed herein. Learn more about how we maintain editorial integrity here.

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