My Migraine Journey

This is my own experience and reading, not medical advice. Talk to a clinician before changing supplements or diet.

What my migraines are like

My migraines are debilitating. The pain sits behind my left eye, my skin becomes sensitive to touch, and I’m sensitive to light and sound. Bad ones can also bring nausea, vertigo and some trouble with speech. With a bad one, the only reprieve is to go to sleep.

1. ChildhoodCorn syrup candy and sodas; weekly migraines. Raw red onions made me vomit.
2. Around 25Golf, hot dogs and nitrates. Then sulfites, and a year-long food log.
3. Around 30Napa Valley: a small amount of white wine, one of the worst migraines of my life.
4. 2017–2018The Dasani day.
5. 2018–2019Cashews at lunch. 23andMe (2017) and digging into the sulfite biology.
6. 2019–2020Fever, back pain, an ER visit, a sludgy gallbladder. Dunwoody test. Histamine.
7. Fall 2020Cut gluten for good. The pain, the naps and the weight loss stopped.
8. Around 2022Smells: perfume, and garlic and onions cooking.
9. 2025–2026Deeper into histamine. GlyNAC didn't work for me. Tryptase test next.

It started as a kid

My migraine journey started when I was a young kid, eating high fructose corn syrup candies and drinking sodas. I got migraines at least once a week, sometimes three days a week. Of course, at that age I never made the connection.

One of my first hints of sulfite intolerance came at a family cookout when I was eight or nine. My parents put a large stack of red onions on my burger, and the red onions instantly made me vomit. To this day, raw red onions give me nausea immediately. I don’t take big bites of them anymore, so I don’t vomit, but they still make me feel unwell.

I also had asthma as a child, and it could have been linked to all of this the whole time. The smoke from a child’s cap gun would trigger it. Putting the pieces together now, I know I’m very sensitive to odors, including the garlic and onions that give me migraines.

Golf, hot dogs and the 13th hole

Around the age of 25, I started playing golf every weekend with my brother and a group of friends. I would get a hot dog after the 9th hole, and by the 13th hole I would predictably have a migraine. Playing every weekend made the pattern easy to see.

That was my sodium nitrate connection, so hot dogs and cured meats went first. A little research suggested I’m also most likely sulfite sensitive, so I started avoiding sulfites too. Early internet research pointed me towards avoiding garlic and onions, and my second trigger discovery soon followed: the garlic powder I was putting on my spaghetti was giving me migraines, haha.

That’s when I learned to keep a food log. For the next year I logged everything, so I could correlate which foods were causing my migraines. The log taught me that my reaction time, from eating something to the first symptom, is anywhere from half an hour to 12 hours, depending on what I ate. That time delay was a big discovery. With a delay that long, many people will have trouble connecting a migraine to something they ate.

The Dasani day

Years later, around 2017 or 2018, another discovery came during a Scrum training at the company I worked for at the time. I didn’t have much time to eat, so I was drinking Dasani water all day, and by the end of the day I had a migraine. Dasani was basically the only thing I’d had, so the water had to be the problem.

It reliably gave me migraines, and I’m not alone: in the sulfite-sensitivity groups I belong to, people say the same thing, they can’t drink Dasani. Its label lists magnesium sulfate, not sulfites, so I can’t say exactly what it is, but the pattern is hard to ignore. So though people think I’m fancy, when I travel for work the only waters I drink are Evian, Fiji, or a safe local water like Poland Spring (not sold in Florida). At home, all of my water comes from a reverse osmosis system, which is good practice for anyone health conscious who wants to avoid the impurities in public drinking water.

Doctors, cashews and histamine

Through the years I saw various doctors with very little success. I learned that doctors in the U.S. aren’t trained in nutrition unless they pursue it personally. When your issues are heavily linked to food, but in many cases aren’t true food allergies, it’s difficult to get direction from the medical community. The first thing a general practitioner noticed was post-nasal drip. Years later I would learn it came from the same things behind my migraines: sulfite sensitivity and, eventually, histamine intolerance.

So I kept up the food elimination diets. Around age 40, I figured out that the handful of cashews I was taking to work for lunch was triggering a migraine. Cashews aren’t sulfited and don’t have a high sulfite content, so it was a mystery to me. Around the same time, I did 23andMe and ran my raw genetic data through an online analysis service. It flagged diamine oxidase (DAO), the enzyme that breaks down histamine. It didn’t flag sulfite oxidase, the enzyme that clears sulfites and needs molybdenum to work, though my reactions to sulfites still point there.

Later I saw a functional medicine doctor, and I had more success with them than with any other doctor. They first pointed out oxalates, which cashews are high in, though that wasn’t the problem. They also ordered an extensive blood serum food test from Dunwoody Labs, now called Precision Point Diagnostics. It’s more than an allergy test: alongside IgE, the true allergic reaction, it measures IgG and IgG4 for other immune reactions to foods. That’s how I learned I’m sensitive to broccoli, the most common vegetable at restaurants around me, and one I’d often eat at home with a steak dinner. The test also suggested eating pork maybe every three days rather than every day.

The 21 foods with a moderate or high result, out of 88 tested. Values in µg/mL.

Food	IgE	IgG4	IgG	C3d
Aspergillus Mix	0.00	0.00	52.59 moderate	0.54 low
Avocado	0.00	0.00	5.88 moderate	10.04 moderate
Barley	0.00	1.03 moderate	1.24 low	0.34
Black Pepper	0.00	0.00	9.84 low	0.79 moderate
Blueberry	0.00	0.00	0.93 low	0.74 moderate
Brewer's Yeast	0.00	0.00	21.31 moderate	0.15 low
Broccoli	0.00	0.00	9.62 high	0.07
Candida	1.01 moderate	0.35 low	86.73 low	2.72 moderate
Clam	12.40 moderate	2.26	19.09	2.71 low
Cow's Milk	0.00	0.00	39.81 moderate	0.12
Egg Albumin	19.65 moderate	17.36 low	26.42	2.83 low
Egg Yolk	0.00	2.30 low	1.69 low	2.96 moderate
English Walnut	0.00	0.00	3.35 moderate	4.87 low
Gluten	8.26 high tolerance	13.23 moderate	149.77 moderate	0.56 low
Kidney Bean	0.00	10.64 moderate	5.59 low	0.40
Navy Bean	0.64 tolerance	7.67 moderate	3.91 low	0.66 low
Pork	0.00	0.00	4.72 moderate	1.25 low
Rice	0.00	0.00	3.60 moderate	0.04
String Bean	0.00	7.14 moderate	4.98 low	0.25 low
Tea	0.00	0.00	8.51 moderate	0.12 low
Vanilla	0.00	0.00	23.93 moderate	0.05 low

tolerance The lab found IgG4 alongside IgE for that food. IgE is the alarm that sets off an allergic reaction; IgG4 can grab the food first and keep the alarm quiet, so the lab reads it as a sign of tolerance rather than allergy.

The other 67 foods on the panel, including beef, chicken, salmon, shrimp, peanuts, soybeans, oats, spinach, tomatoes and strawberries, had no moderate or high result.

Less restrictive diet

Eliminate

Remove entirely.

• Broccoli
• Gluten
• Whole Wheat

Rotate

Out of the diet for 72 hours, or eat less.

• Aspergillus Mix
• Avocado
• Brewer's Yeast
• English Walnut
• Pork
• Tea
• Vanilla

More restrictive diet

Eliminate

Remove entirely.

• Aspergillus Mix
• Avocado
• Black Pepper
• Blueberry
• Brewer's Yeast
• Broccoli
• Candida
• Clam
• Cow's Milk
• Egg Albumin
• Egg Yolk
• English Walnut
• Gluten
• Pork
• Rice
• Tea
• Vanilla

Eliminate (IgG4)

At the provider's discretion.

• Barley
• Kidney Bean
• Navy Bean
• String Bean
• Whole Wheat

Rotate

Out of the diet for 72 hours, or eat less.

• Almond
• Apple
• Asparagus
• Cabbage
• Cacao
• Carrot
• Cherry
• Coffee
• Corn
• Cottonseed
• Flax Seed
• Ginger
• Green Olive
• Green Pepper
• Hops
• Mushroom
• Mustard
• Sesame
• Sweet Potato
• Turkey
• White Potato
• Yellow Squash

Allergy societies don’t accept IgG food testing as a diagnosis, and a standard allergy test disagreed with Dunwoody on gluten. Still, for me it pointed at the right food, as you’ll see below.

Eventually my own research solved the cashew mystery: cashews are a histamine liberator, meaning they can make your body release its own histamine. That was one of my first eureka moments. I might have histamine intolerance, mast cell activation, or both.

Gluten, and a mistake I paid for

The Dunwoody report gave me a clear instruction: eliminate gluten. My mistake was that I didn’t do it right away, and I paid for it.

I was already sick when I took the test. In October 2019 I had a low-grade fever and diarrhea for two weeks, then a fatigue so heavy I slept 12 to 14 hours on Thanksgiving. In early February 2020 I had pain under my right shoulder blade and acid reflux bad enough that I went to an emergency clinic. They checked my heart and did a sonogram of my major organs and arteries, looking for anything wrong. The only thing they found was a sludgy gallbladder, and they told me that if it got worse, I’d lose it. They sent me home with Pepcid. Pepcid and a low-histamine diet helped, but they didn’t fix it.

Through 2020, while I kept eating gluten, I had trouble making it through a full workday. Most days I had to lie down midday and sleep for an hour or two just to work the rest of the day. The back pain made me want to lie down, the indigestion got so bad that some nights I slept sitting up on the couch, and I had trouble digesting even fruit smoothies. I was losing weight the whole time.

I went from 195.6 pounds in October 2019 to 165.2 in August 2020, about 30 pounds, and I hadn’t been that light in a long time. When I finally cut gluten in the fall of 2020, the back pain went away quickly. My energy came back over the following months, I digested things like smoothies normally again, and the weight came back with it.

Looking back, this probably wasn’t new. In college I had bad pain between my shoulder blades that I put down to playing volleyball. Only after I cut gluten and that same pain went away did I connect the two, and I now suspect it was my gallbladder even then.

What I’ve learned about the gut

Your gut lining is a single layer of cells held together by seals called tight junctions. In celiac disease, gluten triggers the release of a protein called zonulin that loosens those seals, letting more through than should. In people without celiac, the evidence is thinner: small lab studies on gut tissue saw a similar but smaller effect. You’ll see this called “leaky gut,” and there are many books about it, but “leaky gut syndrome” isn’t a recognized diagnosis, and the idea that a leaky gut makes you react to more and more foods hasn’t been shown in people. The most credible book I know of on this is Gluten Freedom by Alessio Fasano, the researcher who discovered zonulin.

The gallbladder connection is interesting too. In celiac disease, the damaged gut releases less of the hormone that tells the gallbladder to empty, so the gallbladder empties poorly. That’s documented in celiac, which I very likely don’t have. Losing weight fast can also cause gallbladder sludge on its own, so I can’t say which it was for me.

DAO, the enzyme that breaks down histamine, is made mostly in the lining of the small intestine, and gut damage lowers it. That may be why histamine foods hit me so hard in early 2020, right in the middle of the gluten damage. And my histamine reactions are real today: if I eat a lot of histamine-containing foods, my bucket fills and the migraines start.

So what was it? I’ll be upfront that the answer is a bit inconclusive. I didn’t keep complete food logs during this stretch, so I can’t say for sure what I was eating before each test. What I know is that I got there by stumbling around, and that cutting gluten out for good is what let me heal. It isn’t an allergy: two months before the Dunwoody test, a standard allergy test for gluten and wheat came back negative. It’s very likely not celiac disease either: my 23andMe data shows I don’t carry the gene types behind almost all celiac disease (HLA-DQ2 and DQ8), though that’s a chip estimate, not a clinical test. That leaves a gluten sensitivity, which is real but poorly understood. Whatever the label, the Dunwoody report pointed at the right food for me: its IgG for gluten was the highest on my whole panel, and cutting gluten is what made me better.

If you suspect gluten, ask your doctor about celiac testing before you cut it out, because the test only works while you’re still eating gluten.

What I can say: when a test flags a food and your body agrees, stop eating it right away. I didn’t, and I paid for it.

Smells

About three or four years ago I made the smell connection. I was in the bathroom when my wife sprayed some perfume, and within 30 minutes I had a migraine. I hadn’t eaten anything recently, so I knew it was the perfume.

Then, working upstairs in my home office, I noticed I could smell garlic and onions cooking, and over time the pattern showed: that smell was giving me migraines. Talking it through with my wife, we worked out it was whenever she cooked garlic and onions hot in a pan or in the oven, which aerosolizes them. So it wasn’t really the garlic and onions in my food; it was the smell of them cooking.

Today, garlic and onions are never cooked hot in the oven or in a pan inside our house. They’re always cooked outside. I’m okay eating them cooked into food, and if I do react, it must be very mild. Raw is a different story, as the red onions taught me.

Putting the pieces together

I’ve known sulfites were a trigger since my mid-twenties, around the time of the golf course and the hot dogs. What took much longer was understanding why. In 2017 I started digging into the biology, and my reactions to sulfites led me to sulfite oxidase and the molybdenum it needs. Histamine came in 2020, and over the past year or so I’ve gone much deeper into it.

A 2024 blood test put my molybdenum below the lab’s detection limit, though normal levels are low (usually under 3 mcg/L) and blood isn’t a reliable measure of the body’s stores. My genetic data shows one copy each of three common variants in the gene for DAO, the enzyme that breaks down histamine, and two in HNMT, the other histamine enzyme. Years earlier, my B12 had been low, which is part of why I’d been supplementing it.

I also tried GlyNAC, glycine plus NAC, a couple of times. Each time I got a migraine the next day, so I stopped; I absolutely can’t take it. The one upside I noticed: waking up in the night and in the morning, my nasal passages and sinuses were much more clear than typical, and I felt a bit more rested.

How often now

As a child I got migraines up to three days a week. Once I cut out sodium nitrate and then sulfites, I was down to probably one or two bad migraines a month, the kind I’d have to take time off work for. Things varied through the years, of course. After I found more of my triggers, like histamine and nuts, it was maybe one a month. Since the smell connection, it’s probably one migraine every three months.

What I think is going on

I’m not a doctor, and this is my working understanding, not settled science. I’ve tried to be clear about which parts are solid and which are my theory.

The sulfite bottleneck

Sulfur from food and supplements gets broken down into sulfite, and an enzyme called sulfite oxidase turns sulfite into sulfate, which the body clears easily. That enzyme can’t work without molybdenum; that part is textbook biochemistry. My theory is that my sulfite oxidase is a bottleneck, so sulfite builds up when the sulfur load is high. My genetic report didn’t flag it; my reactions are what point there. Part of this theory comes from Dr. Amy Yasko’s nutrigenomics work (Autism: Pathways to Recovery), which argues that some people push extra sulfur down this pathway because of variants in a gene called CBS. I carry two of them, but her ideas haven’t been confirmed in peer-reviewed research, and honestly, why I’m this sensitive to sulfites is still unknown.

A few honest caveats:

• Dietary molybdenum deficiency has never been seen in healthy people, and there’s no blood test that reliably measures molybdenum status. Supplementing is my bet, not a proven fix.
• Sulfites cause real reactions in a sensitive minority. In lab studies they can make mast cells release histamine, but the human evidence is mixed.
• Whether sulfites block DAO, the enzyme that clears histamine, hasn’t been tested. Interestingly, NAC itself partly inhibited DAO in a lab test, which might matter for me.

Sulfites, histamine, or both?

I’ve gone back and forth on whether sulfites or histamine are behind most of my reactions. Looking at what actually happens to me, I think it’s both, filling the same bucket.

The sulfite side is the strongest. On a trip to Napa Valley around 30, a relatively small amount of white wine gave me one of the worst migraines I’ve ever had, and I haven’t had white wine since, yet I can handle a glass or two of red. White wines are generally allowed more sulfites than reds. Pouring wine through an Üllo filter, which is designed to remove sulfites, seems to help. And sodas with caramel coloring, like Coca-Cola, reliably give me a migraine if I have several, while clear sodas bother me less. The caramel coloring used in colas is one of the types made with sulfite compounds.

The histamine side shows up in cashews and strawberries, both on lists of foods that make your body release its own histamine, and a low-histamine diet helped me in 2020. But aged cheese, which is high in histamine, doesn’t seem to bother me much.

Some things don’t fit either one. Vodka and gin are fine, so it isn’t alcohol alone. Scotch can only be colored with plain caramel, made without sulfites, yet colored whiskies still give me migraines and uncolored ones don’t, so something else in those bottles is the trigger, maybe the casks or the byproducts of aging. And with beer, a headache starts around three and builds with every one after, which feels more like a bucket filling than any single ingredient.

Why my triggers might all hit the same nerve

The trigeminal nerve carries migraine pain, and when it’s irritated it releases CGRP, a key migraine molecule. My triggers plausibly all converge there. Mast cells may play a part too, but that’s less certain.

Trigger	What I think happens	How solid the science is
Hot dogs and cured meats	Nitrites release nitric oxide, which makes the trigeminal nerve release CGRP.	Strong for nitric oxide: drugs that release it reliably trigger migraine in people who get migraines. “Hot dog headache” itself rests on older case reports.
Garlic and onions cooking	Garlic compounds (allicin, DADS) activate TRPA1, an irritant sensor on the trigeminal nerve, and the smell reaches it through the nose.	Lab and animal studies. Raw garlic activated TRPA1 but baked garlic didn’t, which matches my experience that eating it cooked is fine.
Pre-shredded cabbage	Shredding turns cabbage’s glucosinolates into isothiocyanates, the sharp compounds in mustard and horseradish, which activate the same TRPA1 sensor as garlic.	Lab evidence: mustard oil activates TRPA1. A bag of pre-shredded cabbage has had time to build them up.
Perfume	Reactive aldehydes in fragrance activate the same TRPA1 sensor.	Lab data for the sensor, and smells trigger attacks for about 40% of people with migraine, perfume most often.
A big dose of NAC	A large sulfur load all at once; my theory is slow sulfite clearance drives a delayed reaction.	Theory. NAC is absorbed quickly and leaves the body mostly as sulfate.

How my sinuses fit in

A doctor once pointed out my post-nasal drip, and I’ve wondered whether my sinuses are part of the migraine picture. The headache classification doctors use calls “sinus headache” an outmoded term: most of it turns out to be migraine. It does accept that nasal problems can trigger a migraine. Here’s my working model, with the unproven step marked:

In my experience, staying hydrated helps.

Why GlyNAC seemed to clear my sinuses

NAC breaks the bonds that make mucus thick; that’s well established when it touches mucus directly. Taken by mouth, though, only a small fraction reaches the body intact, so the clear sinuses I noticed may partly come from NAC’s antioxidant effect. Glycine plus NAC are the building blocks of glutathione, the body’s main antioxidant, and a GlyNAC trial lowered markers of oxidative stress and inflammation in older adults. Whether any of that happens in the nose hasn’t been studied. For now, I just know what I felt.

My approach now

• Avoid the triggers I know. No nitrates or sulfites, safe water only, and garlic and onions are cooked outside.
• Support the enzymes I suspect are struggling. Molybdenum, because sulfite oxidase needs it to work (the evidence that it helps is anecdotal), and DAO with meals for histamine.
• Avoid concentrated sulfur. Even a bowl of cabbage has given me a migraine. A dose of GlyNAC is a far more concentrated hit of sulfur, absorbed all at once, so it’s no surprise I can’t take it.
• Stay hydrated, even at night. It goes against the usual advice, but I keep water next to the bed and drink right up until I go to sleep. If I wake up to use the restroom, I drink some more, and when I get up in the morning I drink about 20 ounces.
• Keep watching. Reactions can show up anywhere from half an hour to 12 hours later, so when something new goes in, I pay attention for the rest of the day.

I’ll be honest: I haven’t been consistent with supplements. On and off, that’s been molybdenum, B12, DAO with meals, magnesium, and a general multivitamin.

I’m not the only one in my family with odd reactions. My brother and sister have their own, to some of the same kinds of foods and drinks, just with different symptoms.

My next step is a simple blood test for tryptase, an enzyme released by mast cells. A high baseline level can point to hereditary alpha-tryptasemia, a common inherited trait (extra copies of a gene called TPSAB1) linked to flushing, hives and other mast cell reactions. It may have nothing to do with my migraines, but with sulfites, histamine and a family full of odd reactions, it’s worth ruling out.

If this sounds like you

Start a food log. Write down everything you eat and drink, and keep it up for a considerable amount of time: one to three months at least. Because reactions can show up anywhere from half an hour to 12 hours later, you need that much data to see the patterns. Looking back, I made plenty of mistakes by blaming the wrong food or making assumptions, and a log is what corrects them.

If the log doesn’t make it clear, try an elimination diet. Take foods out, then bring them back one at a time and watch what happens. The autoimmune protocol (AIP) diet is a structured version of this. It’s very strict, but it often helps uncover foods you’re sensitive to.

Consider testing, and read it carefully. A food panel like my Dunwoody test turned up things I’d never have guessed, like broccoli, and it pointed me at gluten. My wife took the same test and learned she reacts to bell peppers, something neither of us would have suspected. As I explained above, these tests aren’t accepted as a diagnosis, so treat the results as leads to check against your food log and your body. And if you suspect gluten, get tested for celiac disease before you cut it out.

See a functional medicine doctor. They look at underlying causes rather than just treating symptoms, and I had more success with mine than with any other doctor.

When a food is flagged and your body agrees, stop eating it right away. I didn’t, and I paid for it.

Struggling with this too?

If you’re struggling to figure out issues like these, reach out to me. I’m happy to share what I’ve learned and see if I can provide any guidance or help.