Low-histamine dairy and eggs

Dairy and eggs show how much histamine depends on what happens to a food after it is made. Fresh foods in this group had almost none. In a University of Barcelona survey of foods sold in Spain, five milk samples had no detectable histamine and none of the other amines the team measured. Five yogurts had no histamine and only traces of putrescine, averaging 2.04 mg/kg. Fourteen eggs had no histamine, putrescine, cadaverine or tyramine at all.

Cheese is where the numbers change, and the change comes from ripening. In a 2020 review from the same group, unripened (fresh) cheese had no detectable histamine in 20 samples. Cheese made from pasteurised milk averaged 18.05 mg/kg, and cheese made from raw milk averaged 59.37 mg/kg, with one sample at 389.86 mg/kg. Across 80 cured, semi-cured and grated cheeses in the 2021 survey, the average was 33.10 mg/kg, and one sample in twenty was above 203.30 mg/kg. What changes is the ripening, and the bacteria involved in it. Cheese now has its own section, Low-histamine cheese, with pages from fresh mozzarella and ricotta to parmesan, cheddar and brie.

The published low-histamine diets agree about cheese and disagree about the rest. All ten diets in the team's 2021 review exclude cured, semi-cured and grated cheese. Only one excludes milk. Four exclude eggs and four exclude yogurt, which the review's authors single out as unusually high for foods with no measured histamine. A 2024 clinical review lists eggs among foods low in histamine but lists milk among foods to avoid, without measurements for either.

Butter, ghee, cream, sour cream and kefir have pages here too, but none of them was measured in the studies we use. Their ratings are estimates from how each is made: butter, ghee and fresh cream are made from unfermented cream skimmed from milk, while sour cream and kefir are fermented, and kefir is fermented with yeasts as well as bacteria, so we rate it more cautiously. Each page gives the measurements where there are any, the number of published diets that exclude the food, and what was not measured, such as homemade yogurt and cultured butter. Allergy to milk or eggs and lactose intolerance are separate conditions and are not covered by these ratings.

Sources

1. 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
2. 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
3. Jochum C. Histamine Intolerance: Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Beyond. Nutrients 16(8):1219, 2024. doi:10.3390/nu16081219