Chocolate, Histamines & Getting Over a Cold

So, I am just getting over a sinus infection. To make matters worse, it is over 80 degrees daily and sunny most days. It is November 2018.

Yesterday, I slept a lot, and I felt as if I had fully recovered from my sinus infection. I woke up, feeling good, I reached for a bar of dark chocolate and took half a serving and started eating it.

Now, dark chocolate has some fantastic health benefits; it is a food that is very nutrient-dense. 

But, soon after my first few bites, I erupted into an incredibly intense sneezing fit.

Instantly, I thought of something that I learned a couple of years ago: chocolate contains histamines. This understanding also confirmed and built upon something that I learned about ten years ago from a friend that was studying to be a nurse: there is a connection between colds and allergies.

So, what are histamines, anyway?
Now, histamines are organic substances found in foods. So, the chocolate I consumed had histamines in it. The other part of histamines is that the body naturally has an immune response that correlates with either the histamines in food (or that the body comes in contact with) or the body's ability to fight off the histamines.

So, I ate the chocolate, and I sneezed. Sneezing is a response to increased levels of histamines in the body or, if I am correct, sneezing is the body's response to its decreased capacity to handle the body's histamine levels.

Why do we sneeze when we have a cold?
Either way, I thought it was odd that I sneezed. After all, I had been feeling much better than I did the night before. I had recovered from the usual cold symptoms--body aches and fever--and was otherwise relatively healthy. Compared to how I felt just hours earlier, I felt as if I could efficiently complete an Olympic distance triathlon in less than three hours!

The sneeze was just what I needed, though, to remind me that I was still pretty much recovering from the sinus infection (or cold). Luckily, I heeded my body's reaction and understood the sneezing as my body telling me to hold on because it needed a little more rest before I started back into my normal routine of doing everything I do at 110%.

My histamine response from eating dark chocolate
The funny thing is though, I never really had such an acute histamine response from dark chocolate. I have recognized histamine responses from other foods. Nuts, peppers, shellfish are some foods that have caused noticeably similar histamine responses. I have eaten other fermented foods and such and have had little-to-no negative histamine responses. I certainly eat many other supposed high histamine foods and have had no severe reactions. I reasonably regularly eat Sauer kraut, pickles, kimchi and cheese and have no negative responses. It is just that somehow, this time, the 1/2 serving of dark chocolate was enough to push my histamine tolerance enough over its threshold to yield a sneeze.

Maybe this is just my body's way of telling me that it likes chocolate and that I should take extra good care of myself so that I can continue to keep it among the foods I commonly include in my weekly diet plan.

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