Who knew? Ha ha… after a sleepless itchy night of tossing and wondering and trying to figure out what in the world triggered this insomnia i remembered two things that I had eaten late evening and before bed.  Fresh pineapple and swiss cheese.  I googled it, and found some interesting stuff, some stuff from well known nutritional voices, that there are people who are sensitive to “amines”. So i already knew this, i never drink wine because of the amines (actually I learned that in my 20s that only gin did not give me puffy eyes and a hangover, i don’t really drink anything now) and i had an idea that cheese might not be something to eat late at night.

But what I found was that “ripened cheeses…like swiss” can have a LOT of amines – histamine in particular – and this depends upon how long it is aged and other things and it can vary quite a bit between products and between batches…. OK so no more cultured cheese in the early evening so I don’t have so much circulating histamine,  but what i also found was that pineapple (who knew) releases histamine. Ha ha… double bad…. lots of amines by swiss cheese, lots of histamine release by pineapple.

If you have some amine (i guess this might include glutamine) sensitivity, and you eat a lot of pineapple and cultured cheese before bed, then you might have that “restlessness” and “sleeplessness” that feels a lot like MSG overload.

Just a heads up for those of you who, like myself, might have an “itchy” disease like lichen planus…. and you are already dealing with itching…. you don’t want to increase the amount of histamine you take in or release……!!!