There’s no cure for migraine, the neurological disease that typically causes episodes of head pain accompanied by nausea, dizziness, and sensitivity to light and sound. But by avoiding some of your personal migraine triggers, it may be possible to cut back on the frequency of these attacks.
One type of migraine trigger is food — and not just what you eat, but alsowhenyou eat it.
“While diet alone is rarely the cause of [migraine] headaches, it may well be involved as a trigger for migraine,” says Noah Rosen, MD, the director of Northwell Health’s Headache Center in Great Neck, New York, and an associate professor of neurology at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra-Northwell in Hempstead, New York. “There are varying degrees of evidence for specific foods to be triggers, but there may also be a wide range of individual responses,” Dr. Rosen says.
What triggers your migraine attacks could be very different from what causes, say, your mother’s migraine attacks.
“People in the same family will likely share the same genetic predisposition for migraine but can have very differenttriggers,” explainsThomas Berk, MD, a neurologist and headache specialist based in New York City who is the medical director of Neura Health.
In general, though, going too long without eating or drinking can provoke head pain, according to Rosen, which could put some people at greater risk for a migraine attack than others. This includes “teachers, nurses, construction workers, truck drivers, or other professions where access to bathroom facilities drives underhydration,” he says.
“The ‘migraine brain,’ in general, doesn’t like change,” he says, “and avoiding or missing meals may be as important as what you eat.”
Any personal migraine food trigger — a single type of food or class of foods — may be difficult to pinpoint, but here are some usual suspects to watch for.
