Cholinergic Urticaria

Low Salicylate Diet Worked for My Hives

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Hi all. I wanted to share my story of how my CU went away. Bottom line up front: I switched to a low-salicylate diet and that did the trick.

My cholinergic urticaria returned after 5 years in about December of 2014. It gradually grew worse until I began looking online into what the problem might be, and I found this wonderful website. I began strenuously working-out to exhaust my body’s supply of acetylcholine for the day, which made the rest of the day quite bearable. I described this to friends and family as having to jump into a pile of stinging nettles to start your day. I experimented with my diet, first eliminating gluten/wheat, then soy, neither of which seemed to help much. After messing around I finally decided to get serious and I began the allergy elimination diet as recommended by Ben. That helped a fair bit, and I lost about 10 pounds of weight, which was an added bonus. But the CU never entirely went away.

With some more online searching I came across (www.salicylatesensitivity.com) and the concept of a low-salicylate diet. I gave it a try, and in a few weeks to a month my CU went away entirely, and it has remained in remission (it’s been gone for about two months now). I suggest if the allergy elimination diet doesn’t work for you, try the diet outlined by the website above.

Several of the foods you eat during the elimination diet are high in salicylates, such as sweet potatoes, broccoli, strawberries and blueberries. I now believe that during the elimination diet I was consuming more of the compound that was causing my cholinergic urticaria problem. (someone in the low-salicylate diet group wrote a book with a title something like “The Healthier I Ate, the Sicker I Got”)

The usual caveats apply – I’m not a medical professional, cholinergic urticaria sometimes comes and goes on its own accord, and it’s possible that this low-salicylate diet was just the thing I was trying when the CU went away by itself.

I hope this insight provides help to others on this forum. Good luck to you all, and thanks to Ben for putting me and others on the path to good health!

-Brian H.

Comments

  1. Brian,
    Thanks so much for sharing this experience with everyone. I’m so glad to hear this type of diet helped your hives. It just goes to show that it always pays to keep trying things and to never lose hope. I hope your hives stay gone forever.

  2. This is a great post! Are you going to try to reintroduce foods which are high in salicylate back into your diet? Or are you keeping away from them entirely? I once read on a blog post that you only need to be on that diet a certain amount of time and then your body can heal and readjust. Not sure how true that is or not

    • OP (original poster) here. I’ve got a trip to the jungles of Australia coming up, so I’m not going to push it with taking in more salicylates until after that. I’ve made some diet changes that will probably be permanent (no tea, less coffee, no strawberries, no blueberries, no apples, etc). Maybe I’ll eat a little of that stuff, but not daily like I was on the allergy elimination diet before. Brian H.