In what must certainly seem like hypochondria, I'm now investigating a new dietary strategy for reducing my resting heart rate, which has remained unusually high for my fitness level. My oil free vegan diet has already removed various health risk factors from my daily food intake (dairy, eggs, meat, and oils). The empirical literature demonstrates that this shift alone may extend one's lifespan and reduce the risk of developing any of the common killing diseases of affluence (heart disease, diabetes, and cancer). However, after 25 weeks of eating that way, I was not noticing a major improvement in my symptoms such as shortness of breath. After tracking my resting heart rate for a couple days, I was alarmed to discover that my resting heart rate was 85-90 beats per minute during relaxation! No wonder I used to feel symptoms of congestive heart failure, especially given my intensive physical training regimen at a high body mass index.
Considering the literature that shows a high resting heart rate is an independent risk factor for early mortality, and given my fervent insistence that I NOT DIE before I have built a family and a legacy, I took a more careful look at my diet and researched ways of lowering resting heart rate. Now, I already knew that eating vegan is supposed to lower resting heart rate for most people, so my continued high heart rate was a red flag that something unique to my physiology may be amiss. After some digging around, I learned about histamine excess and realized a large portion of my preferred food intake is composed of histamine increasing foods (fermented vegetables, mushrooms, nuts, tofu, tomatoes, watermelon, sourdough bread, and peppers).
Since I have effectively cut out all pleasurable foods anyway, I figure cutting these out too will not pose any additional challenge, so I will now be excluding all histamine promoting foods, including healthy options such as mushrooms and nuts for the next month to allow my gut biome time to change. Further research revealed that gut flora may play a causal role in high histamine levels, so I will be entirely cutting my intake of these foods, especially since I tend to crave ONLY high histamine foods. I suspect by removing these foods, I will likely starve and kill any parasitic organisms that may have depended on my high intake of histamine and spurred my cravings.
If my vegan diet was me living on hard mode, this diet will be elite mode. What the low histamine vegan diet means in practice is a restriction of almost all pleasurable, processed foods from the diet. No more tofu and soy sauce. No more salsa and hot sauce with my rice and beans. Just black beans, brown rice, oil free popcorn, greens, Rosaceae fruits, cantaloupe, grapes, herbs, vitamins, and sea salt adjusted for allergy tolerance every day for the next month. In addition to dietary changes, I will also be ensuring my home is regularly vacuumed and a HEPA filter is running in the room where I sleep to limit airborne allergen exposure and thereby remove an environmental cause of histamine release. I will also be abstaining from vigorous exercise. Only brisk walking and carrying of work materials will be allowed due to the severe caloric restriction of this diet. After a couple days of these changes, I have been able to breathe better and relax easier. I have lost no muscle mass so far, despite very little exercise. In addition, my heart rate has reduced stepwise day by day from 90 bpm down to 80 bpm to around 70 bpm and less when I sleep. Libido has reduced, but I still get the job done fine. I will report back with more for Week 34.
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