How Sugar and Carbs Could Be Affecting Your Headaches and Migraines

Sugar and carb heavy traits like cakes and lollies and breads, they all sound super tasty and they’re particularly prevalent right now in these weeks leading to Christmas, but could they be contributing to your headaches and migraines?

Hi everybody! My name is Helen and I'm an osteopath here at Melbourne Headache Solutions. Today I want to talk to you about how sugar and carbs could be affecting your headaches and migraines.

Fluctuations in your glucose level affect your brain more than any other organ in your body. These rises and drops can result in headaches. So how does this come about? Well, now, before you start going into a panic saying, I'm going to think, I'm going to tell you to stop eating all your delicious traits. Don't worry, not everybody is affected by sugar and carbs and also not all sugar is bad for us.

There are three different types of sugars that could be really bad for us. It's things like sucrose, which is our white table sugar. Fructose, which is found in fruits and certain foods like in high fructose corn syrup. When you consume these types of sugars in large quantities, it can have a really harmful effect on your health. This includes things like increasing the risk of chronic diseases, gaining weight, rotting your teeth, all that sort of stuff. It can also result in chronic inflammation. This occurs when the body's immune system activates, and it results in damage to the healthy cells within the body. Research has suggested that people with high sugar diets have much more inflammatory markers in their blood. Chronic inflammation can be linked to things like mental health issues, body aches and pains, chronic fatigue, insomnia, and digestive issues. Now these are all related to the onset of headaches and migraines. It's also suggested that when you eat carbohydrates, especially in processed forms like bread and pasta and crackers and stuff, the carbohydrates break down into sugar and glucose. Then this sort of rushes into the bloodstream and then it causes your nerves to actually swell. When the nerves swell, it can cut off things like blood supply to the nerve and then it damages it and so this I think, is what can result in migraine headaches as well.

Sugar and high carb foods are known for also not feeding bad bacteria in the gut. This upsets the balance between the good and bad bacteria and fungi in our guts, and it creates something called dysbiosis. Dysbiosis is the imbalance of the bacteria in our guts. When you reach a state of dysbiosis and your stomach's really unhappy and unbalanced, you can start to develop things like leaky gut —that’s when you've got increased permeability and the walls of your intestines and a lot of your weights, waste products and bacteria, protein and stuff, they can actually leak out and this causes inflammation as well. When you get that inflammation from the gut, it affects your vagus nerves, which actually runs from your brain to your gut, and you can get things like headaches and migraines. Particularly, many migraine sufferers have a genetic variation which prevents them from utilizing carbohydrates really efficiently. They find that the sudden glucose or carbon taker results in electrolyte imbalance, and this imbalance can trigger a migraine. So, things like low carbohydrate diets and the ketogenic diet have been found to be really effective in the management of people with chronic migraines.

One of the biggest problems with sugar that we find is that it's really addictive. Meaning, for those of us who have a high sugar diet, it can be quite hard to give up. So, if you think that your high sugar and high carb diet could actually be contributing to your headaches and migraines, then you might find it beneficial to cut down gradually. You can try doing things like substituting, like the refined sugars, those high-fructose corn sugars and sucrose and stuff, for all-natural sugar that you find in fruit and things like that. And then you can gradually sort of lower your sugar intake that way and your carb intake that way. Also, eating more proteins can also curb some of those sugar cravings as well.

Now, highly processed carbs and sugars come in many different forms, so it can be quite confusing to recognize actually what foods are high sugar. Some of the things that you might want to think about ditching are things like cereals, cereal bars, instant oatmeal, popcorn, chippies, crackers, soda like Coca-Cola, orange juice, energy drinks (these are pretty bad ones) and things like pasta and breads and all these sorts of stuff. Also, things like ice cream, as much as it's delicious, it's also enough of a thing that can be highly inflammatory. So, you might want to swap for items such as vegetables and certain fruits. A good refined sugar substitute that I find is things like date-based cause they can actually be quite sweet, but bear in mind they are also quite high in sugars just not the refined sugar. Also, introducing some healthy fats, so things like avocados, nut seeds, olives, all that kind of stuff as well. Then we also have protein-rich foods that helps keep the calf cravings like beef and fish. Lastly, you can swap some of those other grains for things like some wild rice or brown rice and quinoa as well.

Hopefully you found this really helpful for you and if any of this sounds interesting to you or  you want to talk to us more about headaches and migraines and what we can do for you, then drop us a line below, or you can give us a call at Melbourne Headache Solutions.