Low-histamine bread and baked goods
| Food | Rating | Category | Published diets excluding it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crackers | Bread and baked goods | — | |
| Rice cakes | Bread and baked goods | — | |
| White bread | Bread and baked goods | — | |
| Wholemeal bread | Bread and baked goods | — | |
| Rye bread | Bread and baked goods | — | |
| Sourdough bread | Bread and baked goods | — |
Bread has better data than most packaged foods, and on that data ordinary bread is low in histamine. A University of Barcelona team tested white and wholemeal bread sold in Spain. Two white loaves had no histamine, tyramine, putrescine or cadaverine at all. Six wholemeal loaves had no histamine, tyramine or cadaverine, and putrescine averaging 1.96 mg/kg; the team's 2018 review notes that wholemeal bread had slightly more putrescine than bread made with refined flour. Three other studies in the same review measured putrescine in white bread at 1.1 to 1.8 mg/kg and did not report histamine. A 2020 review by the team pooled 28 cereal samples and found an average of 0.12 mg/kg of histamine, none above 0.89 mg/kg.
The published diets agree. Bread does not appear among the foods charted as excluded in the team's 2021 review of ten low-histamine diets, and a 2024 clinical review gives bread as an example of a low-histamine food, without saying which kinds.
The open question is fermentation. The 2018 review does not say how the tested breads were leavened, and none of our sources measured baker's yeast or a sourdough loaf. Histamine in food is formed mainly by bacteria, and some lactic acid bacteria, the kind found in sourdough starters, can form it, depending on the species and strain. The closest measurement is a 2024 laboratory study of kisra, a Sudanese sorghum sourdough flatbread: naturally fermented bread reached 14.76 mg/kg of histamine after baking, while bread made with selected starter bacteria had none. That is why sourdough bread and most rye bread are rated higher here than ordinary bread, as estimates.
Crackers and rice cakes were not measured. Their plain forms are made from flour or puffed rice with no fermentation step and are rated from that; cheese, soy sauce and chocolate coatings change them. Whatever the bread, the filling usually carries more histamine than the slice: aged cheese, cured sausage and canned fish are among the highest-histamine foods measured. These ratings say nothing about gluten, which matters for coeliac disease, a separate condition.
Sources
- Sánchez-Pérez S, Comas-Basté O, Rabell-González J, Veciana-Nogués MT, Latorre-Moratalla ML, Vidal-Carou MC. Biogenic Amines in Plant-Origin Foods: Are They Frequently Underestimated in Low-Histamine Diets? Foods 7(12):205, 2018. doi:10.3390/foods7120205
- Comas-Basté O, Sánchez-Pérez S, Veciana-Nogués MT, Latorre-Moratalla M, Vidal-Carou MDC. Histamine Intolerance: The Current State of the Art. Biomolecules 10(8):1181, 2020. doi:10.3390/biom10081181
- Sánchez-Pérez S, Comas-Basté O, Veciana-Nogués MT, Latorre-Moratalla ML, Vidal-Carou MC. Low-Histamine Diets: Is the Exclusion of Foods Justified by Their Histamine Content? Nutrients 13(5):1395, 2021. doi:10.3390/nu13051395
- Jochum C. Histamine Intolerance: Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Beyond. Nutrients 16(8):1219, 2024. doi:10.3390/nu16081219
- Hassan AAA, Jin YH, Mah JH. Effects of Lactic Acid Bacteria on Reducing the Formation of Biogenic Amines and Improving the Formation of Antioxidant Compounds in Traditional African Sourdough Flatbread Fermentation. Antioxidants 13(7):844, 2024. doi:10.3390/antiox13070844