Low-histamine plant milks

Plant milks are widely used in place of cow's milk, and they are among the least measured drinks in the studies we use. Of the drinks people actually buy, only soy milk appears in the tables we take numbers from: three soy milks from the Spanish market had no histamine, with putrescine averaging 1.02 mg/kg, in a study collected in a University of Barcelona team's 2018 review. Oat, rice, almond and coconut milk were not measured there.

The raw ingredients are better covered. Oats and rice had no detectable histamine (two samples each), and 28 cereal samples pooled in the team's 2020 review averaged 0.12 mg/kg. Seven almond samples had none, and nuts as a group, 47 samples in the 2021 survey, had none either. Coconut does not appear in the tables at all. For comparison, cow's milk, five samples, had no histamine or other amines, and only one of the ten published low-histamine diets excludes it.

The ingredients are not the whole story. A 2022 review of amines in drinks describes how plant milks are made: the grain, nut or seed is extracted with cold or hot water, the solids are separated off, and the drink is pasteurised or UHT-treated. The same review reports a study of plant milks made from cereals and pseudo-cereals that found histamine, the most abundant of the amines it measured. We could not check that study's figures, so we do not quote them, but if the finding holds, a plant milk can carry histamine its raw grain did not.

That is why our ratings here are estimates and differ by base. Oat and rice milk, the cereal milks, are rated more cautiously than almond and coconut milk. Each page says what was and was not measured. Plant milks are not on the 2021 chart of foods excluded by published diets.

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. 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
3. 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
4. Visciano P, Schirone M. Update on Biogenic Amines in Fermented and Non-Fermented Beverages. Foods 11(3):353, 2022. doi:10.3390/foods11030353