Migraine diet - Migraine - Dietary Recommendations

Is there such a thing as a migraine diet? The answer is, yes and no. Don't get me wrong - I'm coming to believe that the food you eat (and don't eat) is a critical step in treatment - one that really is overlooked a lot more than it should be. So what would a diet for migraine sufferers look like?

Migraine diet - a typical approach

A common migraine diet approach - and the one that doctors tried on me - is to cut out one or two "triggers" at a time, and see if there's any improvement over a few weeks. Your doctor may ask you to cut out bananas and chocolate from your diet, for example.

This solution can work for many people - it's the quick-and-easy solution. Many people do have problems with the "common" triggers, and if cutting bananas from your diet solves the problem, that's reason to celebrate! (If you have to cut out chocolate, that's another story - how can we live without chocolate?) To learn more about this approach, check out this article on migraine triggers.

Major triggers and many triggers
This approach, however, does not work with everyone. Some people may find temporary relief, and may find no change at all. Why is that?

One possible reason is that there are are several triggers that are causing a problem. Many researchers today believe that triggers are not so much a matter of - eat one nut and get a headache, for example, but a combination of things that build up and eventually overflow into a migraine attack.

So a diet for migraine sufferers might end up being a general avoidance of several triggers. Many migraine cookbooks are built around this idea. The recipes avoid various common triggers to varying degrees, and it's up to you to find the foods that commonly cause problems, and simply avoid them more often than not.

Sometimes triggers are not things like onions, but major things, such as flour, or food with tyramine or tannins. When the list of things to avoid is long, a migraine diet may take even more sophisticated planning.

Dr. Seymour Diamond, founder of the Diamond Headache Clinic, has had a great deal of success with the Low-Tyramine Headache Diet. He includes full details of the diet, including general guidelines and which foods to avoid or just eat with caution, in his books Headache and Your Child and Conquering Your Migraine.