HEALING MIGRAINES NATURALLY
Dr. Leslie Cisar
Topic: A runny nose when eating and its connection to migraines
Transcript of Leslie_Cisar_Clean_Edit.mp4
Video duration: 1:08:13
Readable transcript prepared from the edited video. Punctuation, spelling, and a few incomplete phrases have been lightly edited for clarity. Timestamps are approximate and refer to the edited video.
[00:00:00]
Welcome to the Healing Migraines Naturally podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Leslie Cisar. And I'm a licensed naturopathic doctor, former chronic migraine sufferer. And I've dedicated my life to helping other women with chronic migraines rediscover a migraine-free life. Today we're going to talk about a woman she's very put together. She's very conscientious when she leaves the house. She takes time to look nice, do her hair, her makeup, clothing. But she always has a Kleenex in her left pocket. And it's always in her left pocket because she's right-handed and so she eats with her right hand.
[00:00:45]
So the Kleenex is always in the left pocket. And she's figured out her whole routine. She'll wait until somebody else is talking and then she does a quick dab. One little low-pass low, close to the table. Sometimes she does a little cough first, so it looks like it's the cough. And she's using the tissue to cover the cough. She's gotten really good at it. She's been practicing this for years. Because about four minutes after she sits down to eat any meal at home, at a restaurant, at her sister's house. Her nose starts running.
[00:01:28]
Not like a little tickle, not like a little touch, an actual continuous drip, like a faucet. And this is a clear...it's like water, right? I mean, the way she describes it, it's like water just coming out of my nose. And if I weren't to dab it with that tissue, it would just drip. It would literally drip right down onto the plate. So if she's eating, what if she's at like a work lunch? Oh, like those end-of-the-year holiday work parties where you've got to go to the restaurant with your coworkers, half of whom annoy you to no end, and you can't wait until you have that whole week off at the end of the year and you won't see them anymore.
[00:02:15]
But the last hurdle to cross this year is the holiday party, right, at the restaurant. Well, what do you do at these places? You're at this big table with all these people, a lot of whom, right, you're having conflict with, and you're trying to dab your nose. She's trying to dab her nose all the time. She sat across from a man on a third date with a wad of tissue balled up in her fist under the napkin. She's got Kleenex in her car, her purse, her desk, her coat. She's 39 years old, and she has an entire Kleenex infrastructure.
[00:02:51]
And when she mentions it to people, right, because it's sort of now it's like, does anybody else have this? Am I weird? What's going on here? So she's started to kind of talk about this with people. What she hears back is, oh yeah, if I have spicy food, my nose runs. Except this isn't just when she's eating spicy food. It's like Tuesday's chicken and rice dinner. It's the salad. Some days it's toast. So she brought it up to her doctor once, and the answer that she got is the answer that probably everybody gets.
[00:03:28]
Oh, it's allergies. Try an antihistamine. So she tried an Allegra. It really didn't do anything. So she just went back to the Kleenex in her pocket and just stopped bringing it up. And this is, I want to highlight this, right? Not the nose, the fact that she just stopped asking, right? She just sort of learned to live with it because this is a symptom, and she's had this symptom for a decade. And now at this point she's decided that there's no answer and that the only thing left to do is hide it better.
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But there is actually a medical name for this. It's called gustatory rhinitis. So Gustatory means having to do with eating or tasting. Rhinitis means inflammation in the nose. So the name of the condition translated into plain English is your nose runs when you eat. So it's kind of funny, a lot of medical diagnoses are just this, right? It's basically the symptom converted into Latin and then repeated back to you. And there's a conventional medical treatment for this. It's a prescription nasal spray. You may know it as Atrovent, though it's usually dispensed as a generic now.
[00:04:51]
It's in a drug class that's called an anticholinergic. So what that drug class does is it blocks the nerve from firing. So basically it's blocking the nerve that sort of feeds or stimulates the gland in your nose that secrete the mucus. So if you stop the nerve signal, the gland isn't going to make the mucus. So it's very effective at doing that. It works. It stops your nose from running. But why is your nose running in the first place, right? So if you want to really see how narrow thinking this is, when you read the label, the approved use for this medication, this is the actual wording, symptomatic relief of rhinorrhea.
[00:05:48]
So rhinorrhea, again, another medical term that means runny nose. So that's it. The prescribing information says it right there, that it does not relieve nasal congestion. It doesn't relieve sneezing. It doesn't relieve post nasal drip. It relieves runny nose. It shuts off the drip. That's the whole product. So the manufacturer is telling you in the official prescribing information that the one and only thing that this does is stop the flow. So for this particular problem, the standard advice is to use it like 30 to 60 minutes before you eat. OK, so let's picture that. OK, a woman standing in her kitchen before dinner or going into the bathroom at the restaurant before the holiday dinner.
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God forbid they serve the meal late, right? Because you've got a 30 to 60 minute window that you have to dose this in. And heaven forbid the waitstaff doesn't get the food out on time, right? This thing could wear off mid meal. One of the listed side effects is dry mouth. OK, so again, if you're blocking that nerve signal, you're spraying that in your nose, you're blocking those nerve signals. You might start to block the nerve signal that feeds your salivary glands. OK, so saliva is very, very important, particularly if you're going to dose something like this before you eat.
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You want to have adequate saliva. Saliva is required to start the digestive process. It's also very hard to chew and swallow your food without adequate saliva. So you block you're trying to block one thing and you may block other things as well. So in the medical literature, this is classified as an idiopathic condition. Another medical term for you here. Basically, idiopathic diseases or conditions. Idiopathic basically means we don't know why this is happening. So a lot of times like idiopathic hypertension, right? That's a common one. You've got high blood pressure and we don't know why. So it basically means we don't know why you're having it, but it's probably not going to kill you.
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And don't worry about it. So the official position is we don't know why your body does this. We're pretty sure it doesn't mean anything. And let me give you something to make it stop. Right. Sounds pretty familiar. That's what our medical system is based on. So everybody knows, right? They don't have a medication deficiency, right? Even though our medical system, the conventional medical system is based on an incorrect understanding or if I'm going to be a little less generous, I'm going to call it a false understanding of actually what causes disease and what promotes health.
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Millions of people can believe something that's not true. Just because millions of people believe something to be true doesn't make it true. And that's the case with our medical system, unfortunately. And you can tell if something is true by the fruit, right? So when you have a false understanding of something and you act according to that false understanding, reality is going to express itself. No, maybe not right out of the gate. Maybe not for a few years. But eventually, if you're operating from a false understanding, reality is going to let you know eventually.
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And more and more Americans are realizing, wait a minute here, the fruit, this is a bitter fruit, right? I went to the doctor and 10 years later, I'm feeling worse, right? The symptoms are worse. I've got new symptoms. I got side effects. And all along, I had an intuitive understanding that I don't have a medication deficiency, right? What they're giving me is not addressing an underlying cause or some sort of deficiency, right? It's blocking the symptoms. It's preventing my body from generating the symptoms that are causing me suffering or causing me discomfort.
[00:10:00]
So, you know, this is like taking your car into the mechanic because, you know, all of a sudden the check engine light comes on. Uh oh, I better get this checked out. Check engine light is on. And you pick it up from the mechanic and you notice that there's a piece of black electrical tape over the check engine light on the dashboard, right? And you ask the mechanic, what did you do? There's a piece of tape here, right? Well, yeah, but you don't see the light, right? You don't see the check engine light anymore, right?
[00:10:33]
I fixed the problem, right? That's what I think we all intuitively know that we're doing when we're taking a medication. It's just that we're desperate, right? I know all of you listening, you don't want to take the medication you're taking, but you're desperate. So, nobody would call this a repair, right? Put that electrical tape on top of the check engine light on the dashboard, nobody would call that a repair. And I think we realize that the medications that we're taking are sort of like this nasal spray for the gustatory rhinitis, right?
[00:11:08]
It's just shutting down the symptom. Now, before I tell you what I think is actually happening here, I want you to know how common this is because that part alone would change how that woman feels in those embarrassing moments at her table. So, there's a study out from a general medical clinic of 571 people, just like regular patients, these are not migraine patients, but just regular people coming in for different reasons. And they ask them whether food makes their nose run, whether eating makes their nose run. 69% said yes, okay? 7 out of 10 people said that when they eat, their nose runs, okay?
[00:12:03]
This is how common this symptom is, and it comes up frequently with my clientele, and we're going to talk about why this is a very common symptom amongst migraine sufferers. But again, it's like, what are you going to do about this, right? You want to take a nasal spray every time you eat? Oh, you're just going to use a Kleenex? You're just going to keep living your life, right? So, what these people have is they have a symptom that's giving us very valuable information, but nobody knows how to read that information.
[00:12:34]
Now, let's narrow it down to migraines, right? So, the largest study that I found on this looked at nearly 6,000 people with migraines. So, 67% of these migraine sufferers, again, this is not the general public, this is a study specific to migraine sufferers. 67% of them also had rhinitis, runny nose, nasal inflammation. And if you're listening to this podcast, this is probably not a surprise to you, nasal congestion is absolutely one of the most common symptoms that migraine sufferers will have either on a day-to-day basis or particularly when they have a migraine.
[00:13:22]
And according to this study, the ones who had more congestion were more likely to have higher headache frequency. So, more nasal congestion, more stuffy nose, more plugged nose, more migraines. And I'm going to tell you why this is exactly what I would expect. But this is the number that I would actually like to put in front of a neurologist. Almost 3,000 people who had been told or through their own research had sort of self-diagnosed, about 3,000 people had been told that they got sinus headaches. Okay, so this again is a notorious phenomenon amongst migraine sufferers.
[00:14:12]
I've done a couple different podcasts now on sinus infections, sinus pain, and migraines, right, because the way that the pain is generated by the body for a lot of migraine sufferers is in the nasal cavities, right? So, they're having the pain on the bridge of the nose, right above the eyebrows, under the eyes, their nose is getting plugged up or running, right? So, it feels like there's something in my sinuses. It's very, very common. So, they took a group of people who said, "I have sinus headaches or I've been diagnosed with sinus headaches," and they actually diagnosed them using the criteria to diagnose migraines.
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So, 88% of these people in this study got diagnosed with migraine or migraine-type headache, okay? So, again, if you've struggled with this, we just had Monica on the podcast a few weeks ago. This was something that she struggled with for years. I mean, I can just off the top of my head think of client after client I've had over the years. When they started getting head pain, they thought it was sinus infections. I've had clients that have been on multiple rounds of antibiotics for years with no relief because of this misdiagnosis that it's a sinus infection or I've had clients where they're getting CT scans, MRIs, all scopes up their sinuses, right?
[00:15:50]
It's not a sinus problem. We're going to, again, talk about why. But 88% of these people that participated in this study were actually met the criteria for migraine or migraine-type headache. 80% of those 88 had full outright migraine diagnosis once they ran them through the migraine criteria. So we've got nearly 9 out of 10 people walking around treating a sinus problem that's not a sinus problem, buying the decongestants, blaming the weather, getting the CT scans. It was a migraine the whole time, and their nose was part of the migraine, not a separate thing happening at the same time.
[00:16:37]
And that same study asked them what they were feeling, and 63% of them had nasal congestion. 40% had a runny nose. So this is not a rare presentation. In the largest group of these patients that anybody is taking the time to look at, the nose was involved in nearly 9 out of 10 of them. So again, I want to reiterate, the nose and the head or the nose and the migraines, they're not two different problems. And then there's the study that almost got there. So a couple years ago, researchers ran a genetic study, right?
[00:17:19]
Because now in this day and age, everything's genetics, right? And like I said before, genetics is basically a scientific way of saying you're unlucky, which is what they used to tell every migraine sufferer before we had cracked the human genome. Well, you're just unlucky, what could you do? Right now it's, oh, it's your genes, which again, scientific way of saying you're unlucky. So researchers ran a genetic study to settle the direction of it, okay? So because if nasal symptoms and migraines keep showing up together, one of two things is probably true.
[00:17:56]
Either the nose is causing the migraines. Again, this is not my thinking. This is the conventional medicine way of thinking, right? We've got two things showing up at the same time. Which one is causing the other? That's the conventional way of looking at things. So either the nose problem is causing the migraines or the migraines are causing the nose problem, right? That's how they are going to look at it. So they looked and they found neither one. There was no causal relationship in either direction. Nasal symptoms don't cause migraines. Migraines don't cause nasal symptoms.
[00:18:35]
That's what they concluded after all of this genetic study. So they wrote up in their conclusion that the association must come from some shared mechanism underneath driving both. I couldn't agree with them more, right? That's absolutely the case. But that's where they stopped, right? Because that's where the study ended. So I'm going to pick it up from here because I know what that thing is underneath. So let's talk about what a runny nose actually is. So within naturopathic medicine, a runny nose is a toxicity symptom, okay? Not an allergy, not a malfunction.
[00:19:24]
It's not your body being oversensitive or dramatic or broken. It's what we call an elimination response. Your body is trying to get rid of something and that thing is toxins, okay? So the nasal discharge is doing two things at once. The first one, when we really think about it, it becomes really obvious. It's flushing, right? It's generating that nasal discharge. And in order to generate a nasal discharge, you have to generate inflammation within the nasal cavity. There's no other way to generate that discharge. Inflammation is used by the body to do critical work.
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Right now, especially in like the natural medicine space, the biohacker world, everybody talks about inflammation, functional medicine space. Oh, inflammation, we got a lower inflammation, we got to get rid of inflammation. Inflammation is required for healing, for all sorts of processes in your body. To make your stomach acid, you have to generate inflammation, okay? So the inflammation is generated to create so that this discharge, the nasal discharge can be produced and that watery discharge, it really runs. It really flushes, right? It's like you got your own neti pot right in your nose, right?
[00:20:49]
So that watery dripping discharge, it's trying to flush things, not only out of your nose, but it's flushing things out of your body. So it's moving waste material out through the mucous membranes. Like, that's a positive, okay? It's annoying. I've had this symptom myself. It's an annoying symptom, but it's a positive. The body's trying to do something positive to help you. The second one is one that nobody thinks about. That extra mucus, also it's like a wall, a barrier. It's trapping whatever's in the air that you're breathing before it can get to you, right?
[00:21:34]
The capillaries in your nasal passages are going to allow environmental toxins, airborne environmental toxins, into your bloodstream, okay? So if your body has decided that it's already got enough toxins in there, it's going to generate a protective mucus layer, right? So that I don't absorb more from the air. I'm already overloaded. Now, I know what happens when I say the word detoxification. This again is, oh, I can't go on Facebook or YouTube without getting an advertisement for a detox product or a liver product, right? So when you hear the word detoxification, everybody thinks the liver.
[00:22:25]
And yes, absolutely, the liver is the major organ of detoxification, but detoxification is not technically an organ. It's a biochemical process, and it runs in other organs besides your liver. It runs in your lungs, the wall of your digestive tract, and inside your nose, okay? And that surprises most people. So let me be specific. The lining of your nasal passages is one of the most active detoxification tissues in your body outside of your liver. Why wouldn't it be? It's in direct contact with the outside world where there's a lot of toxins.
[00:23:10]
And again, when we hear the word environmental toxin, we think of manmade chemicals that we've polluted the environment with, which I'm not a fan of, I'm not advocating that. But even before humans had the technology and the ability to produce manmade polluting toxins, our natural environment is full of toxins as well. It's not like we've ever been living in a pristine environment. That's why we have these systems, okay? So the tissues in your nasal cavity carry those same detoxification enzymes that your liver does. It's built like that on purpose to intercept what you breathe before it reaches your bloodstream.
[00:23:57]
And it's got mucus and cilia, which are these little hairs that move things out, and your immune system. It's all lined up there to protect you, continuously, all day. We don't even know this is happening. We only know it's happening when we get annoyed with it, right? So your nose, it's not just like this cavern. It's not like this hallway that things are passing through. It's actually doing filtering, if you will. And a filter that's working hard is one of the only pieces of this whole system that you can actually see working.
[00:24:36]
You can't see your liver. I mean, there are some indications I won't go into them in this podcast, right? But we can't get some clues when the liver is overactive. But this runny nose phenomenon, it's so obvious, right? It's actually a great symptom. It's one of my favorite symptoms. So I told you a few minutes ago that conventional medicine's name for this translates from Latin to your nose runs when you eat. So my profession has a name for it, too. And I want you to hear the difference. We call it an ameliorative discharge, okay?
[00:25:17]
So ameliorative means it makes the person better. That's what the word means. So the name of this in naturopathic medicine is a discharge that improves you, a discharge that's going to improve your health or make you feel better, ultimately. It's like I say, I understand it's unpleasant when it's happening. But ultimately, if you let this process occur, you're going to feel better. And so there's a whole framework behind this. We call the body's elimination routes, that's toxin elimination routes, the emunctories, okay? So the primary ones are the lungs, the kidneys, the bowels, and the skin.
[00:26:05]
And the kidneys, right, generating the urine. The secondary ones are the nose and the eyes, okay? So naturopathic medicine was put together as a framework over 100 years now. But this type of understanding was starting to develop about 100 years prior to that. So for about 200 years, a sort of rogue group of physicians started to understand these concepts and started to put these frameworks together. So we call this an ameliorative discharge because, again, if you let the body do what it's trying to do, it's going to help you. It's going to make you feel better.
[00:26:48]
Last May, I shared on the podcast that I went out with my family to one of those Japanese hibachi restaurants, and I woke up the next morning with massive runny nose and watery eyes and bags under my eyes and everything else because those hibachi meals, they've got a lot of chemicals in them, the sauces and everything else, right? There's a lot of chemical flavor enhancers in those meals. And so that meal really generated a toxin overload within my body. And so the next morning my body was doing what it is designed to do.
[00:27:28]
It was trying to flush all of that out. And so I had this pretty spectacular ameliorative discharge. So check out that podcast. We'll link to it below. But what I shared in that podcast was this. I knew what was happening, right? So again, if I had not sort of changed the course of my life when I was in my mid 20s and I continue to live as a typical American and I love us. This is no shade on any of us. But if I had continued to live that way, I would have done what most Americans would do, right?
[00:28:02]
Oh my goodness, my nose is running my eyes, right? I got eye drops, I got a nasal spray, I got a decongestant, I got an antihistamine, right? I would have taken a lot of things to try to make that go away. But I knew what was happening. And so I just let it run. And I talked about having to take a Kleenex because this was around Mother's Day. So it was Saturday before Mother's Day. It was Mother's Day dinner with my in-laws. And then the next morning we were having a Mother's Day brunch with my mom and dad.
[00:28:32]
I had to take tissue to the thing, right? But by the time I was done with that Mother's Day brunch meal, it had settled down. I let it run. I let the discharge run, and it helped my body flush all of that out. So that is what ameliorative discharge is supposed to look like. Unfortunately, very few Americans have experienced this because we have been told to take something every time something like this happens. So when I talk about this is a discharge that should make you feel better, you may start to think, well, I've had this runny nose for 10 years.
[00:29:11]
I'm not better. How is this making me better? Well, again, I'm going to continue here and explain that. But when we're allowing the body to do what it is designed to do, this is the potential. And obviously, the rest of the way that I live my life, I am living my life in a way that's supporting my body. And so when I have this type of overload, I can let this ameliorative discharge run, and in a few hours I'm going to feel better. But that is because I have the fundamentals in my life, the foundation of my life stacked up, so that when my body does what it's supposed to do, I notice the response.
[00:29:55]
And this is the tragedy. This is why I'm so motivated to do the work that I do, is that millions and millions of Americans, they'll never experience something like this because we have a misunderstanding of health and disease and what the foundations and fundamentals should be and how to live our life overall in a health-supporting way so that when something like this happens, we're not knocked down flat. So I'll get off the soapbox now and we'll continue on here. So again, just to reiterate here, if you've got this gustatory rhinitis, it's not your body malfunctioning.
[00:30:32]
Something's not actually going wrong. Your body's trying to accomplish something. It's trying to help you. So why does this happen at meals? So again, when you understand what's going on here, I really hope that you're getting a lot of aha moments here. It's because when we eat, we are generating a massive toxin overload in our body. So again, when I say the word toxin, most people are thinking environmental toxin. They're thinking Roundup or pesticides or things like food red dye number five. We make toxins. I call it metabolic waste material.
[00:31:13]
So when our body runs its biochemistry, there's waste material that's generated. So again, I'm not in favor of putting food dye and everything and poisoning the environment, but I just want to reiterate. We make the toxins and our natural environment is full of natural toxins. Like arsenic is a natural substance that's highly toxic. So this problem, just blame environmental toxins is really understating the issue. So when we eat, this generates a massive metabolic waste material overload in the body, a massive toxin overload in the body. To make hydrochloric acid, you're going to have to make metabolic waste material as part of that process to make your hydrochloric acid.
[00:32:00]
So our digestive tract is one of the biggest things that our body does. Digesting our food and everything that's involved with all of the organs of our digestive tract is absolutely one of the biggest things that our body does every day. So our digestive tract, just a function, is generating a tremendous amount of waste material that has to be detoxified. Then the food that we eat also has to be detoxified. Even if we're eating pristine, organic, top-top food, you have to detoxify your food. So when we eat, we have to have room for all of these toxins.
[00:32:53]
So if you have room, I like to think of this as we sort of have this little toxin bucket inside of our body. It's never empty. You're never going to drain your toxin bucket to zero. Best case scenario, it's going to be about halfway full all the time. But if it's halfway full, I've got room in the bucket to add to it when I eat. If my bucket is all the way up to the top, then every time I eat, it's going to overload. And when it overloads, the body says, "How do I clear this load? How can I help this process out?"
[00:33:32]
So if your capacity is already overloaded, the meal is going to tip it over. And when it tips, something's got to give somewhere. So I've said before on the podcast that like our digestive tract, we shouldn't feel anything in there. We should just eat our food. And then next morning we have a bowel movement. We're really not consciously aware of anything going on in there. We shouldn't have gas and bloating and heartburn and all these symptoms that are so common. So I want to add to this list, okay? If your nose runs at dinner, that's a toxicity symptom.
[00:34:17]
It shows up at the dinner table because the meal is what is bringing that toxin load in, okay? But what you're watching is your body trying to clear itself, okay? It's not being generated because of the digestive process. It's being generated because of the toxin overload that eating inevitably generates. So a lot of you might be thinking, "Dr. Leslie, everybody's nose runs when they eat Thai food or spicy food. That's not a toxin overload. That's a chili pepper. That's capsaicin," right? And you're right that chili peppers and capsaicin can trigger a runny nose.
[00:35:01]
However, not everyone gets a runny nose when they have capsaicin or spicy food. Although the spicier the food, the more colorful the food, the more fragrant or aromatic the food is. They've shown this in studies. The more likely people's noses are going to run when they eat those food. So they've actually done studies where they've given people different sort of, the way the study conceived of it was spice levels, right? So they gave people different spice levels and then they monitored the runny nose reaction, right? So up at the top is very, very colorful food that are spicy.
[00:35:45]
You know what's at the bottom? Bread. Bread was the least likely food. Only 6% of participants got a runny nose when they ate bread. White bread. So most people will look at that and that's what the researchers did too and say, "Well, there you go. It's a spicy food. It's an irritant and the nose reacts to that irritant." Mystery solved. But I want you to look at that list differently. Look at what's at the top and what's at the bottom and ask what actually separates them. Because there's something about plants that almost nobody talks about.
[00:36:21]
The more colorful a plant food is, the more aromatic it is, the more flavorful, the spicier, the more phytonutrients it has, right? The color of the food signals the nutrients. This is why there's the advice to eat a rainbow, right? You're advised to eat a wide variety of colorful foods. Plants are going to have the most obvious color variety and variation. Although non-plant foods, you will also see some color variety and variation if you look closely. In my daughter's elementary school, when you walked into the gym/cafeteria of our school, they had all these posters on the walls with these little cartoon, like fruits and vegetables.
[00:37:10]
They had the green fruits and vegetables, the purple fruits and vegetables, red fruits and vegetables. And there were all these little posters that said, "Eat a rainbow," right? So this is very well established. The nutrients are colorful molecules, okay? And the things that we call spices, those are just like super nutrient-dense plants, right? They're so nutrient-dense that you can smell the nutrients, okay? So when you're tasting all that flavor, the flavor is actually the nutrients. Now, here's what I call the plant nutrient/toxin paradox, okay? Because we call those plant nutrients phytonutrients, okay?
[00:37:57]
Phyto means plant, nutrients, okay? So the colorful plants, the different colors, the different phytonutrients have different colors and they make the food colorful, different colors. Those phytonutrients are also phytotoxins, plant toxins, okay? So every time we're eating, particularly plants, okay, we're eating toxins. But the toxins are also nutrients, okay? So this is why I call it the plant nutrients/toxin paradox, okay? So plants, they can't run away from predators. They've got to poison predators. And so plants make toxic molecules. Now, it's interesting, most of the plants on the planet, we can't eat. They'd kill us.
[00:38:54]
We only eat a very, very tiny number of plants that grow on the planet. Most of them are toxic because all plants make these toxin molecules to avoid being eaten, okay? And the more colorful the plant is, the more toxic the plant is. Think about, like, chili pepper, right? Chilies. You're going to avoid eating them. They're a very nutrient-dense plant, but they're also a very toxic plant. So they've actually looked at the particular detoxification pathways that some of these phytonutrients/phytotoxins go through. This is why you've probably seen some drug advertisements where at the end of the advertisement and, like, the verbal fine print that they race through, they say, "Don't take this with grapefruit juice."
[00:39:51]
Because a nutrient/toxin in grapefruit has to be detoxified by the same detoxification pathway that the medicine goes through. So when they put a drug on the market, they have to look at, okay, how is this eliminated from the body? They have to identify the detoxification pathways. There are different pathways for different shapes of molecules. So they have to look at, okay, what pathway is this particular drug going to go down? And they've started to look at, okay, what are the phytonutrients/phytotoxins that also go down this same detoxification pathway? Because if I take a medication and they say, okay, take 500 milligrams of this because when it passes through your liver for the first time, your liver is going to immediately clear half of it.
[00:40:49]
So if we want a dose that's going to work, we've got to give you 500, and then 250 will actually make it into your bloodstream. This whole calculation is done because your liver, when you take a drug orally, your liver immediately is going to detoxify some quantity of that drug before it even hits your bloodstream. So they look at all of this. They can put the correct dosing together. And if grapefruit is going to go through that same pathway, well, now I've got a problem because they gave me 500 milligrams, but I can't detoxify half of it because I've got all this grapefruit clogging up the works.
[00:41:27]
Now I'm going to have like a drug overdose because I ate grapefruit. So this is not like naturopathic woo woo stuff. They're telling you this in a drug advertisement. So let's look at this list again. So a chili pepper is about the most phytonutrient/phytotoxin-dense thing a person could eat. And white bread is about the least. It's literally colorless. So the list, they think they're ranking the list by how much things burn the mouth. It's actually a ranking of food from most toxic to least toxic. So spicy food isn't the exception to what I'm telling you.
[00:42:17]
It's the clearest example of it. And I want to tell you why I think that my explanation is better than the standard one. The standard explanation is that capsaicin hits a nerve receptor and triggers a reflex. Fine. Yes, that does happen. I'm not arguing with that. But that explanation predicts that everybody's nose would run when they eat chili peppers because that reflex would be triggered in everybody. And not everybody's nose runs when they eat chili peppers, only about half. And most telling is it doesn't explain why some people get a runny nose when they eat white bread toast, which in their own studies it happened to 6% of the people.
[00:43:03]
So my explanation covers the whole list from top to bottom. How much your body has to clear against how much capacity you have to clear it. So if you want to eat a lot of really colorful, nutrient-dense/toxin-dense plants that everybody knows are good for you, you better have room in your toxin bucket. And I've talked about this before on podcast episodes we've done on food triggers. Food triggers, right? You eat a tomato, nice bright red, technically it's a fruit. It's a very nutrient-dense plant. Well, boy, it's one of the top migraine trigger foods. How'd that happen, right?
[00:43:45]
This is what's going on. Now I want to get to the part that matters most. I want to separate two things because this is the whole reason I'm doing this episode. Everything that I've told you about the nose running during a migraine, that's documented. Nobody's fighting me on that. I've experienced a runny nose with a migraine. If you're listening to this, I bet you have too. The nose symptom, nasal symptom, is very well established. But what I'm talking about today is the woman whose nose is running at lunch on Tuesday when her head feels completely fine, which also happens to migraine sufferers.
[00:44:31]
It's very common. I see this all the time with my clients. So it's the same mechanism. It's the same overload. It's the same elimination response. The only difference is she hasn't gotten the migraine yet. Her load is already there. Her body is already responding to it. It's just not big enough to cost her a migraine. So when we get a migraine, right, I've talked about how a migraine is a hangover without the alcohol, okay? If we think of this little toxin bucket inside of ourselves, we get the migraine when the toxin bucket spills over the top, okay?
[00:45:10]
The runny nose is going to be generated before the bucket spills over, okay? This is what I call a canary in the coal mine symptom. So miners, like coal miners, used to take a canary in a cage down into the mine with them. And the reason wasn't because they wanted the company of a canary. There's gases, right, in mines, right? And you can't smell them. They're invisible. And so if you can't see it and you can't smell it, by the time you realize there's a problem, you're going to die at the bottom of the mine, okay?
[00:45:54]
But a bird is very small, and birds are also very sensitive to toxins. Remember when they first came out with Febreze, and people were spraying Febreze in their house and their pet birds were dying? Birds are very sensitive to toxins. And so they would take a canary in a cage down into the coal mine, and if that bird died, they knew they got to get up to the surface and get out of the mine. So now if you can't watch the air, you watch the bird. Your nose is the bird, okay?
[00:46:27]
So a toxin load in your body is invisible. There's no lab test for it, okay? There's no imaging that we can do. Oh yeah, you're at 80%, right? So we have to look at the symptoms that the body's generating to get a read on where that bucket is, okay? So your nose is one of the most sensitive and one of the most exposed tissues you've got, and it reacts at a level of load that isn't high enough to give you a migraine. It's reacting early, and that is what makes this symptom so valuable.
[00:47:05]
By the time you're having migraines, you already know you've got a big problem, right? You know something's up, but a runny nose at dinner, right? She's not thinking she's got a big problem. So seven out of ten people have this symptom, and you can grade the symptom. Let me tell you how to grade this symptom, okay? Because it's not just about if your nose is running. It's about how little it takes to get it to run, okay? So if it's only chili peppers, if someone has to hand you the hottest, most loaded thing on the table to get your nose to run, that's at the very top of the scale.
[00:47:46]
You're consuming a lot of toxins with that meal, and your capacity got tested at the maximum, and it flinched a little. That's what happened to me with that hibachi dinner. It wasn't a lot of chilies, but it was all these sauces and God knows what they have and all of that stuff, all of the things that they put on the hibachi grill to make the food taste good, right? So my system got tested, okay? Now, if it's the plain food, right, if it's the toast, that's at the bottom of the color scale.
[00:48:21]
If your nose is running with chicken and rice and the salad with nothing on it, your body is reacting to the smallest demand that you can put on it. So same meter, same mechanism, both ends of the scale. The question is just how little it takes to move the needle. And if the answer is not much, that's worth knowing now while a runny nose is the whole price that you're paying. And again, if we knew how to interpret these symptoms, because again, with migraines, for myself, I'd be hard pressed to think of a client.
[00:48:58]
To us, when the migraines start happening, it seems like it's out of the blue. Where did this come from? How did this happen? But when we go back through the health history, we see for 10 or more years, there were these canary in the coal mine toxicity symptoms that were starting to develop prior to the migraines. The bucket was filling up and filling up, and the body was sending these signals to us. But because we don't know how to read the signals, you go into the doctor, "Well, your nose runs when you eat.
[00:49:32]
I don't know. Here's a nasal spray." The doctor, the lauded doctor, doesn't understand how to read the symptom. And so the canary has died in the cage, but we don't realize it. And this is generating so much suffering, so much suffering because we don't know how to read these symptoms. If when I started getting allergies when I was in high school, severe allergies, I've talked about this on the podcast, and my parents, bless their hearts, it's not a criticism of my parents, but they were just typical Americans. So they took me to the allergist, and I started taking allergy shots in my thigh once a month.
[00:50:12]
No one knew that allergies are a canary in the coal mine symptom. And that was 10 years or so before I started getting migraines. So I've said this a couple times already. I hope you caught it. I love this symptom. Gustatory rhinitis is one of my favorite symptoms because when I have a client that tells me that her nose runs every time she eats, I'm thrilled, okay? I'm not thrilled that she's having the symptom. Like I said, I've had the symptom. It's annoying. But I'm glad she told me because that symptom is one of the most useful symptoms.
[00:50:50]
And I'd rather have that symptom than all of this imaging and all of this blood work and all of this other testing that she's already had before she's come to me. And here's why. Because let's say that she's having two to three migraines a week, okay? Which is no joke, right? But no, at that pace, she's maybe going to hit the chronic migraine diagnosis threshold of 15 migraines per month, or just under that. It's no picnic, having two to three migraines a week, for sure. But she's sitting down to eat three times a day.
[00:51:29]
So that's 21 times a week that we can get a read on this versus two to three times, okay? And think about what that means if I'm trying to figure out whether what we're doing is bringing her toxin load down. Migraines, right? Yeah, migraines are a toxicity symptom, and we definitely look at that, but they're not as common in this woman's case as this gustatory rhinitis. They're more infrequent. She might have a week without any migraines occasionally, right? She doesn't have to get two to three migraines a week. She might have a week or two where there aren't any migraines.
[00:52:16]
So then again, in that case, how would I gauge that we're on the right track? Well, I can use this symptom to tell us if we're on the right track because her nose is giving us a report every meal three times a day every day, okay? So the same question, how much is this body carrying as far as the toxin load? We're getting an answer to that 21 times a week instead of two to three times. And I'm reading the direction, okay? So with most symptoms, they don't just sort of turn off like you flipped a switch.
[00:52:55]
Most symptoms, there's incremental improvement. And this is one of those symptoms where I'm looking for incremental improvement. Occasionally somebody might say, "I just woke up one day and my nose just stopped running at meals." Great, I'm thrilled. Usually what happens is my nose didn't run the whole meal, it only ran half the meal, right? I didn't need three tissues, I only needed one. I don't think it happened at dinner, but lunch and breakfast it did, right? So we're looking for incremental improvement, fewer foods setting it off. No, I actually had toast and it didn't happen, but I did have that kale and it ran again, right?
[00:53:36]
So less intensity, it stops after a minute instead of the whole meal, right? That tells us that the load is coming down. And if it's going the other way, right, if it's getting worse, then I know that too and I know that immediately I don't have to wait for the migraines to get worse. So when she tells me that her nose isn't running like it used to, I don't need to wait and see what her migraine count does that month. I know that we're probably on the right track. And then I'm also going to expect, yeah, pretty soon here we should see a shift in the migraines or we're already seeing a shift in the migraines too.
[00:54:15]
So let me give you a real client example. So I have a client who used to keep Afrin in her migraine kit, right? So chronic migraine sufferers, right? We got the kit, we got our little pouch, right? We got all of our meds, our Imitrex, our nausea meds, maybe some ginger tablets, or in this case, Afrin nasal spray. Sometimes that'll be in people's migraine kits, right? So when she would get a migraine, her nose, okay, would completely block, just could not breathe in and out, just completely blocked up. And so she would use Afrin to get it unblocked, okay?
[00:54:55]
Now, as of today, I couldn't tell you the last time she used it, okay? Now, does she still get migraines? Yes, she still has migraine flaring occurring. However, the migraines are less severe. She needs less abortive medication, pretty notably so. And her nose is not blocking up anymore. Like I say, I couldn't tell you the last time that she took that Afrin. So it takes more to swell a passage shut than it takes to make a drip. So when I see the blocked nose, I know that I'm looking at a bigger load, and there's something worse about it than just being uncomfortable, which you already have the framework to see.
[00:55:40]
Remember what we call this, an ameliorative discharge, a discharge that makes the person better. A runny nose passes that test. Material is leaving, and you feel some relief when it does. A blocked nose fails that. Nothing is coming out. The inflammation got so loud that it swelled shut the very exit that it was trying to use. Same intent, worse outcome. And so this is where also, sometimes within like the natural medicine space, there's a false belief that anything the body does is a positive, and you should never take any action.
[00:56:18]
The body would never do anything wrong. Everything the body does is great. Well, sometimes the body can overreact to things, or sometimes, in this case, the toxin load can be so great that the body is working so hard that it actually works in a counterproductive way. In this case, completely stopping up the discharge, which would be more preferable. So again, I'm not one of those natural practitioners that says, "Everything the body does is just fantastic, and it never does anything detrimental." Sometimes things can get so far out of balance that the body has a hard time helping itself, and this would be one of those cases.
[00:56:57]
But again, what we do is we get that load lowered, and then, like I say, the congestion lifts. In this case, I actually don't remember. I'd have to go back and check my notes. I don't remember if she generated more of a runny discharge first, but like I say, if that would happen with a client, I would view that as a positive. My memory is serving me that she stopped needing the Afrin, as her migraines improved. If your nose runs at dinner, and you've been wishing it would stop, I totally understand.
[00:57:30]
But you're on the better end of this. The running is actually preferable to it being completely blocked. That's what makes my client's story worth telling. It wasn't that her blocked nose got easier to manage. It's that it stopped being a blocked nose. That's a different amount of material. We can see that her little toxin bucket started to drain, and the body wasn't using this nasal discharge and required inflammation to help her out. While we're here, I want to answer the question that a lot of you have asked me, which is why on earth would my nose be involved at all in a headache or a migraine?
[00:58:16]
What's the connection? The connection is that your nose isn't doing this by itself. Like I've just talked about, think about what else happens around a migraine. A lot of women, if a migraine is a toxin overload, like I say, a migraine is a hangover without the alcohol. Migraines, in addition to sort of talking about classic migraine, which head pain is predominant symptom, there are so many other toxicity symptoms that come along with a migraine in addition to this nasal congestion, runny nose, totally blocked congestion, both of which are a toxicity symptom.
[00:58:57]
A lot of women have to urinate more. That's a documented early warning sign or prodrome, hours or even a day before the pain starts. Your kidneys put toxins in your urine. If you have an overload, your kidneys are like, "Let me make more urine." "Oh, things are building up. She's about to get a migraine. Let me try to get this load cleared first so that we don't have a migraine." Nausea, vomiting, textbook toxicity symptoms. Watery eyes. This is what I had after the hibachi meal. You're trying to flush things out.
[00:59:34]
Some people sweat more. Now I give that list back to you. The body's elimination routes, the kidneys, the bowels, the skin, the eyes, the nose. It's the same list. Your kidneys, your gut, your skin, your eyes and your nose all get busy around a migraine, and every one of them is how your body eliminates toxins. That is not a headache with a bunch of unrelated nuisances attached to it. It's your body opening up every door it has and the headache is happening in the middle of it. I'll say clearly what I'm not claiming because I don't want to oversell this.
[01:00:17]
I'm not telling you that every single part of your migraine symptoms are toxicity symptoms. There are actually other symptoms associated with migraines that are not toxicity symptoms. There are more nutrient deficiency symptoms such as visual auras or the neurological type symptoms, the hemiplegic or the vestibular migraine types. Yes, there's a toxicity component to those migraines, but there's also a significant nutrient deficiency component to those migraines as well. But that classic cluster, the classic migraine, those symptoms associated with a classic migraine are textbook toxicity symptoms. And they can occur in people with a toxin overload even if they're not a migraine sufferer.
[01:01:06]
Which brings me back to the woman with the Kleenex in her pocket. She's been embarrassed about this for years. She's been discreetly dabbing, hoping nobody notices, apologizing for it if it becomes obvious. And she's sitting at a table with a bunch of people at it, building a whole system around hiding it. The left pocket, the fake cough, the stash in her purse, treating it as the humiliating thing about her that she has to work around. It isn't the humiliating thing about her. It's one of the most honest things that her body is doing.
[01:01:48]
Her body has been giving her a report, a data, an update, three times a day, every day for ten years. But nobody ever told her how to read the report. So you don't have to take my word for this. If you have this symptom, you can test this yourself this week for free. Eat beige food for a few days. Eat plainer food for a few days. Meat, eggs, rice, potatoes. Not real colorful stuff. Not really highly seasoned food with those really nutrient-dense plant foods that we call spices. Then see if your nose improves when you eat.
[01:02:34]
If it settles down, you just demonstrated this entire mechanism on yourself at your own kitchen table without spending a dollar. If your bucket, however, is very, very overloaded, just eating like this for a few days may not give enough relief to your system. But if you've been anywhere near the internet or Instagram in the last few years or TikTok, you've probably heard about people doing something like this and getting dramatic results. The extreme end of this is the carnivore diet, which I've also talked about on the podcast. The explanations that you'll hear for why this works are all over the place.
[01:03:23]
The lectins, the oxalates, the nightshades, histamines, autoimmune, inflammation, everybody picks a different villain. But I think it's much simpler than that. You've removed the plant toxins and your toxin load dropped as a result. So when you don't consume a lot of naturally occurring toxins in your food, yes, you're still going to generate all of those metabolic waste material toxins. You still have to detoxify your food. But if you lower the color load in your diet, you're going to lower the incoming toxin load that your liver has to deal with. So that's why it works.
[01:04:06]
No matter if you're blaming the lectins or whatever, the nightshades, whatever, you can blame any of those things. But it's all coming down to this plant toxin or phytotoxin, phytonutrient, what I call paradox. It was never just about one thing in the food. It was about the combined total. And I will even use this clinically. So for some of my clients, if there's a very, very significant toxin overload, I will recommend that they eat a beige diet for a while. It's a real intervention and it absolutely will work for some people.
[01:04:49]
But we should use it properly. If we use this way of eating for a period of time to kind of take the load off and give the body time to sort of catch up, that can be very helpful. But what has happened here and what is causing problems is that somebody might eat like this or go full carnivore for three weeks and feel notably better and then blame the plants. And we do need to eat plants. So what has happened within this space is that people are now blaming plants for things, but now you have an even more restricted diet than you had before.
[01:05:36]
So we can use food therapeutically, but the ultimate goal is that our body is functioning properly so that we can eat a wide variety of foods that we like to eat. And we can go to a restaurant or somebody's house or we can go to a wedding and not be the odd person out that can't eat anything. And we do need plant nutrients. That's also very well documented. The goal is to get back to the colorful food. The whole point of taking the load off is so that you can eventually carry it again.
[01:06:10]
It's the same thing that I say about hormones. A liver that is not overloaded can handle a menstrual cycle. It's not the hormones that are causing the problem. It's the buildup of the hormones, the inability of the body to detoxify and eliminate the hormones from the body. It's the same thing here. The chili pepper is not the problem. The chili pepper is showing you where's your bucket? Where's the load in the bucket? So I want to go back to you if you've got a Kleenex in your left pocket, okay? You've been treating that as a nuisance.
[01:06:50]
Something to manage quietly so that nobody sees it. Something to apologize for. Start treating it as information, as data, because that's what it is. Your body is telling you three times a day exactly how much it's carrying. It's not an allergy. It's not nothing. It is definitely not something to be embarrassed about. It's the most honest report that you're going to get about the state of your health, and it's free, and it's showing up whether you asked for it or not. Your nose isn't misbehaving at dinner. It's doing its job.
[01:07:27]
The question is, what is causing it to work so hard? And if you're living with chronic migraines and you're ready to finally understand what's driving them and what to do about them, I would love to talk. I offer a free consultation call. The link is in the description. We'll spend about 30 minutes talking about your migraines, any other health conditions you have. I guarantee it's going to be the most productive 30 minutes you've spent on your health in a long time. And then from there, we'll put together a game plan to get this problem solved and get you feeling better, get you back into your life.
[01:08:09]
Thanks so much for being here. I'll talk to you soon.
