I guess I have just itched a lot for my entire life, so I just scratch and don’t really think about it. But it was recently brought to my attention by someone, and I realized that I am scratching constantly. Like all over my body. I’ll scratch my leg, then my head itches, then the back of my hand, then my cheek, then my arm, and so on and so on, every few seconds. I might scratch 10 or 20 spots within a minute. I think I might stop scratching if I’m really focused on something, but if I start thinking about my itching, then it just keeps happening. And like I said, I think this has been going on for my entire life, but I never really paid much attention to it. Is this normal?
Another possibility that I had to discover for myself is a sensitivity to nitrites such as you find in bacon and deli meats. Or sulfates in wine. These are not allergies, and benedryl won’t help, although prednisone will make it temporarily go away. I had to just stop eating those foods, although now they’re offering more “uncured” meats, which don’t bother me.
FYI, a whole lot of “uncured” meats, at least in the US, are just kind of using loopholes. Often there’s a little asterisk next to the word “uncured”
And if you follow that asterisk to the bottom of the back side of the package or wherever they decided to hide it in small print you’ll see it says something like “contains no added nitrites or nitrates except those naturally occurring in celery powder or other natural ingredients”
And spoiler alert, celery has kind of a lot of nitates and nitrites.
And while there are regulations about how much pure nitrates/nitrites they can add to your food, there’s no regulation on how much celery powder they can add because it’s just considered a “flavoring” ingredient and not a curing agent. “Uncured” bacon or hot dogs or whatever could technically contain far more nitrites than would legally be allowed in their cured counterparts (though in practice I’m sure they’re probably roughly the same amount)
Regardless of if those nitrites are pure or coming from celery powder, it’s the same chemical doing the same thing in your food and body.
Other veggies contain a lot of nitrites/nitrates too, cabbage for example. I’ve occasionally had it happen when I make cabbage rolls in a pressure cooker that despite being totally cooked through the ground beef is still a pretty vibrant red/pink like corned beef because of the nitrites from the cabbage.
I’m not saying this to scare-monger or anything, there are valid health concerns about nitrates and nitrites in general, and of course people like you who have a particular sensitivity to them, and it’s well worth being aware of all of that. That said, I’ve been dabbling in curing my own meats and have a big jar of Prague powder #1 in my pantry which is 6.25% sodium nitrite, so clearly it’s not something that’s particularly high on my own list of concerns. I also intend to try curing my own corned beef at some point with celery juice and other natural sources of nitrites, not because I think it’s any healthier but because it sounds like a fun experiment.
You’re correct, and things like celery powder do contain nitrites. These workarounds have never caused me any problems, but I’m sure people vary. I can eat regular bacon every once in a while and be fine, it’s only after a few days buildup that I start the Big Itch (followed by the big hives.) Everyone has to work out their own tolerances.
You might want to look into histamine intolerance.
Foods like that can elevate histamine levels because they contain histamine, and some people are less efficient at flushing them out of the system (either during or after digestion), so it results in allergy-like symptoms even without an allergy per se.
Oh, that’s very interesting. I never knew what the mechanism was. I never really learned if it had a specific name. It was just something I finally figured out for myself after a lot of grief with no answers from the doctors.
There are a few genetic factors that can contribute to it. I’m lucky enough to have most of them, so it’s been a journey figuring this out. What got me on the right track was trying a low histamine diet for a week, and all kinds of not-quite-allergy things I had experienced my whole life began to clear up.
The exact list of foods varies a bit depending on the resource, but here’s a pretty good one.