It has been suspected for some time that particular foods can trigger migraine attacks... foods such as cheese, red wine, and chocolate. By the time I consulted those headache specialists at the Klinikum Grosshadern in Munich (end of the seventies) I have been told that I could try to avoid migraine headaches by not eating precisely these foods: cheese and chocolate.
I was not pleased with the advice that I should forego cheese in particular. During the years in Munich, when I worked for a TV station, I was an ardent consumer of very Bavarian, strong-smelling, hearty cheeses. Actually they were the staple of my diet with some 300 to 400 grams a day.
The idea that my cheese consumption would trigger my migraine attacks seemed, at that time, so strange to me that I never took it seriously, even though I had clear indications to support the idea, as I know from hindsight.
Rather, for as long as I lived in Munich, I blamed the weather there for my headaches, which is common practice in Munich. I then thought this to be obvious because I suffered from migraines when in Munich but did not during my travels to Southeast Asia, which I first undertook every few months, and then every few weeks.
Of course, in Southeast Asia, the weather is different from Southern Bavaria. But apart from that, the food that has been available to me in Southeast Asia at that time was also very different. No cheese.
The migraines were a major reason why at the beginning of the eighties, I left Munich to settle in Southeast Asia.
As far as income was concerned, it first didn't work out so well in Southeast Asia. I may even say that I had a hard time for a few years. But I sure, too, didn't have a headache problem. The migraine attacks ceased completely.
Until a few years later, when I was well established and again could indulge in cheese, even though Gorgonzola, Camembert, and Roquefort could only be bought at five-star hotels and at prices matching the prestige of the shopping environment.
My migraine attacks also returned in full force. Even though it is quite obvious to me now that they were caused by those generous servings of cheese, I was blind for that fact at the time the attacks reoccurred. This time around, I didn't blame them on the weather, though. The weather in Manila is too different from Munich for that. Rather, I expected as culprit the stress of professional success.
My streak of good luck in business (the publishing trade) didn't last long and I soon had to move to another country and start all over again. Gone were the professional luck, the stress of being successful, the migraines, and the cheese platters.
That's how I saw it then. Today I know that I should put it this way: Gone were the success, and the means to buy expensive selections of cheese, and, because of the modified diet, the migraine headaches.
It took another cycle of success, cheese, and migraine attacks until I finally realized their cause.
So, why does cheese cause migraine headaches? What ingredient is at fault?
I am scientifically minded but not a practicing scientific researcher. But I think I do have a clue as far as migraine is concerned. And the self-experiments with lisuride have something to do with it.
During the second Asian cycle of success, cheese, and migraine (beginning of the nineties), I came across a newspaper item in which it was reported that scientists now definitely linked cheese and migraine. I gave up cheese completely for a few years (only), and I don't remember a single migraine attack after I did. But I don't want to give the credits entirely to the absence of cheese. I do remember that headache specialist at the Klinikum Grosshadern in Munich who, to console me, predicted that my migraine attacks would cease all by themselves after some twenty years.
That seemed an awfully long way off for a young man who felt so brain-damaged that he would wonder whether he would make it for another two, not another twenty years.
Now those twenty years have passed, and I want my migraine attacks back. Surprised? I bet you are.
Actually, it's not the migraine attacks I want back, but the general state of health, or the pathological condition that accompanies them.
Headache researchers speak of a specific "migraine personality". I am a migraine personality, though one who has passed the migraine phase of his life.
However, I can relive migraine symptoms, the nausea as well as others, when ingesting lisuride.
Lisuride is a Parkinson's medication. All Parkinson's medications work by enhancing dopamine synthesis, the inhibition of dopamine re-uptake (the storage of dopamine for eventual later use), or by supporting dopamine functionality through other means.
A good number of Parkinson's medications are MAO inhibitors. MAO stands for, no, in this case not the Cultural Revolution but "monoamine oxidase". Oxidase is an enzyme in the human body (-ase is the common ending of the scientific names of enzymes). Dopamine (and noradrenalin, as well as some other neurotransmitters) are monoamines by chemical structure.
However, monoamines do not only occur as neurotransmitters with a delicate influence on human well-being. Monoamines are also a common part of many foods. The most important monoamine in food is tyramine, and, you guessed it, foods particularly high in tyramine include, in first place, cheese... aged cheese in particular.
Classic MAO inhibitors are a dangerous medication. They don't only inhibit the MAO that breaks down the neurotransmitter dopamine, the wished-for effect in the treatment of Parkinson's. They also inhibit the MAO in the digestive tract where it is responsible for foods such as cheese. And that can be very dangerous because those tyramines of which there are plenty in cheese then make it into the neuronal control system where they mimic noradrenalin and cause increased blood pressure and heart rate, possibly leading to death. Physicians themselves call the condition not by a strange-sounding Latin euphemism but have named it in plain English as the "cheese effect".
Wow, cheese as a deadly poison.
Dopamine medications, including MAO inhibitors, are of interest not only in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. I have mentioned previously that the one Parkinson's medication that is the actual topic of this series of articles, lisuride, is, in some countries, an accepted drug for the treatment of impotence in men.
It took me a long time to realize the connection between cheese and migraine. But I now see a connection not only between the two, but, in a wider scope, between cheese, migraine, tyramines, dopamine, and being hyper-sexed.
Migraines are a discomfort, but being hyper-sexed is a wonderful condition. Previously, I thought it funny that while being bed-bound with migraine, and nauseated to a level where walking ten meters could make me vomit, I would still make regular use of my rights as a husband. And the same happens when I am nauseated and bed-bound by lisuride.
I mentioned above that I want my migraines back. No, not my migraines, but a health condition which is characterized by a susceptibility to migraines.
I want to be constantly activated as when I was your typical migraine sufferer. I want to be as driven by sexual desire as during a younger age. And I want to get the same pleasure out of my sexual encounters. In my best time, I could have wonderful climaxes just from a bit of embracing and a bit of kissing. It never occurred to me, that other people, and I myself at a later stage in life, would experience sexual encounters during which they, and I, just couldn't get it going. I used to be able to turn myself on by just willfully focusing my thought on a specific girl, or a specific scene that I would imagine.
I tried a lot. I even tried cheese. I discovered that I now have a perfect tolerance for cheese. I don't get migraine headaches from cheese. Any amount. And cheese doesn't work as aphrodisiac.
But lisuride does. Provided I take it in the correct way. Site subscribers can read in part 3 of this series how it is done.
