Question for Gary: Diamine oxidase and prednisone

Interesting question. Don't really know if I know the answer. I do remember taking DAO at the same time I was on prednisone. I was doing just fine during the time but it is possible that maybe if the prednisone was working (which it did) then maybe the DAO wasn't. I have a lot of respect for nurses (often times they are smarter than doctors) but I wouldn't take her suggestion on face value as being fact. It was just her opinion.

My best advice is to see if DAO actually does something for you before you try figuring out the rest. I use about 3-4 bottles per month so the cost per pill for me is much lower. You can get periodic deals or free shipping. I don't want this to come out sounding wrong but if you are going to be cheap about it then I don't think DAO is going to work for you anyway. In the beginning I put the DAO to the test. Certain foods I ate, particularly cheddar cheese items and pizza, would send me to the bathroom about 20 times in the next few hours. I took several DAO, like about 4, and then ate the very same things which I knew were bound to send me to the bathroom as a test. Notta. Amazing! After taking the DAO I did not have a bad reaction. The trick is that if you eat foods higher in histamine than you have DAO to neutralize it, you will have a reaction to the foods, like I did. Since food labels don't show how much histamine is in the item and you don't know how much DAO your body has available, it is all a guessing game. I take one DAO capsule before all meals but if I know I am eating a high histamine meal then I take much more than one capsule. Sometimes I take two, sometimes three. Tonight I ate Lasagna which is high in histamines and sprinkled parmesean cheese on it, which is also high in histamines, and also ate some garlic cheese bread on top of that. I took 4 DAO and that seemed to do the trick, no bad reactions. As I said before, it is all a big guessing game as to how much DAO to take per whatever it is that you are eating. If you are going to cheap out and just take one DAO before eating a meal like I did tonight then you are probably still going to have more histamine than DAO and you're probably going to be running to the bathroom, making it a waste of time and money for you.

I'm not sure how the prednisone factors into all this. If you're doing OK now then maybe you should hold off on the DAO but if you're still having problems now, even while on the prednisone, I would give it a test and see what happens. If you are doing fine now you could save the DAO until you are tapered down to a lower dose of the pred. The most important thing is to give the DAO a test, purposely eating a high histamine food that you know causes you problems.

But, as I said before, before you do anything you need to put the DAO to the test by taking three or four before having a meal that you KNOW will cause you problems and see what happens. If it works then you know it works. If it doesn't then you know it doesn't work and there is no sense in wasting your money anymore. By the way, you can't overdose on DAO by taking too much. If you take too much all it means is that you have more DAO than you have histamine and you have basically just wasted pills and money because they will only work up to the amount of dietary histmines you have. It will not harm you. Good luck.

Hey Gary is this the product you take? I want to order some if so:

www.swansonvitamins.com/q?kw=Diamine+Oxidase

For the life of me I can't find it anywhere around here.

Reason#1:

I added the Clove Oil with pretty awesome results for a few days. Made a gluten free pizza with a small amount of tomato sauce two days ago, no problems the next day. Made one with a LOT of tomato sauce the next day and the result was D twice, urgency, and a tiny bit of mucus. 24 hours later, perfect poop starting again.

Reason #2
My niece. She is Diagnosed with IBS-D. She followed what I was taking to a "T" and went from 20 bouts of D a day down to two or three mostly normal BM's. She said to me last night that when she eats a known trigger food (cause she get's tempted) she can usually get away with it now, but the next time (or next day) if she cheats again she get's double payback lol.

This signals to me the allergy/histamine type side of things that I had not paid attention to before.

We will both try this - Will be an interesting experiment from two perspectives IBD and IBS both having the same issue with some known foods.

It's funny actually, I have not had "D" or mucus or urgency in so long now that I was like what the heck?? It threw me off... Or through me for a loop. More so, even though I had D it didn't keep me from leaving for the day or working or anything. Was just a minor IBS type annoyance for a bit.