25 Sep Natural Alternatives to Anti-Histamines
Natural Alternatives… Where Will You Find Allergy Relief This Season?
Spring a beautiful season with light warm winds, vibrant green foliage returning to trees and plants producing a wonderful display of flower, pollen is great for bees but can be a terribly debilitating factor in seasonal allergy sufferers, so what are our natural alternatives? Seasonal allergic rhinitis is a combination of symptoms that include sneezing, nasal congestion, nasal itching, and increased nasal discharges. The eyes, ears, sinuses, and throat are commonly involved also. These sets of symptoms can be mild to severe disrupting many people’s lives and causing other health complications. 20% of the population suffers from this condition so this is a big issue this spring.
Seasonal allergies have varying symptoms pictures. Some people will have more sneezing and nasal congestion or others will have very itchy and irritated eyes. These symptoms however have a common underlying signal to initiate them and that is histamine. Arms of our immune system defend us against irritants or immune insults produce this chemical. In spring especially, pollen is classed as the immune insult and as you breath in the pollen this arm of the immune system releases masses of histamine. Then within seconds histamine is initiating the above symptoms. This is of course how medically we treat allergies or at least the symptoms of. They are anti-histamines and here in Australia we sell millions of doses each year. However there are natural alternatives to pharmaceutical anti-histamines and they have added benefits of enhancing deeper underlying mechanisms to seasonal allergies.
When we consider underlying mechanisms we are talking about biochemical reasons that underlie why the bodies immune system responds to allergens with excessive amounts of histamine. Pollen of course is not an invader or a chemical irritant out to damage the body. So why is it that the body overreacts? The loss of tolerance to the outside world is a big topic in medicine today and the major calperate is the gut and the microbial populations that interact with the immune system. When the body has a population of bacteria or yeasts in the gut that increases the defence mechanisms too high the body has the tendency to overreact to benign substances such as pollen. If the body has for example a healthy population of yeasts and bacteria messages are relayed to the immune system to increase tolerance and to react to real invaders such as infections. There are of course many other mechanisms at play with seasonal allergies such as infections in the sinus, heavy metal sensitization, chemical accumulations, food allergy and genetic tendencies. However to give a taste of the treatment options available natural antihistamines and changing the microbial balance in the gut are a good starting point.
Natural alternatives to anti-histamines that also change gut microbial balance are:
- Fresh Garlic Extracts
- Baical Skullcap Extracts
- Raw Onion Extracts
- Citrus Extracts
- Perilla Extracts
- Lactobacillus rahmnossus LGG.
- Bifidobacterium species
