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I stopped eating much meat in my 20s, and they reduced, and I gave up meat altogether in my 30s, and have never had another one. I've heard they may have been nitrate or nitrite related, or sodium related, and I've heard that they just reduce in some people with age, so that may be the only reason.
The MSG ones were the worst. It felt like my eyeballs were being squeezed, and I would vomit repeatedly until I was dry heaving from the pain. It hurt to close my eyes, so I would try to fall asleep with them open. They were almost like seizures more than headaches. Had them from fifth grade until tenth, when finally a doctor suggested they could be MSG. I quit eating anything with MSG, and rarely got the most extreme ones again. I went from missing forty to fifty days of school a year from the headaches to not having them at all just by giving up MSG. After that, the times I did get them again, I could always trace it back to the last meal I had, and it was always connected to MSG, and since I checked labels religiously, it was a rare thing for me to eat anything with it.
I'd still get the beginnings of migraines, but they wouldn't develop quite as far. They would just cripple me a little, rather than completely incapacitate me. I don't know if I saw flashers, but my whole body would go sort of numb. Even those headaches were painful, but not like the worst ones. I've had a full-blown gallstone attack, a shattered toe, and an ankle run over by a car, and none of those came close to the pain I felt as a kid with those headaches. The good side was that it made me not care about tension or sinus headaches--those were a breeze, comparetively!
So, I don't know if MSG caused them, or if MSG triggered something else in me that caused them, but the relationship between me eating MSG and getting these blinding headaches was clear. I can eat MSG now and then and not have any problems, but every time I had the problem I had recently eaten something with MSG.
Trof, I used to eat a lot of crab and shrimp boil, and I'd always get headaches afterwards, because all those Zataran's boils were loaded with MSG. I noticed that connection even before the doctor suggested MSG, so I used to tell people I was allergice to shellfish to get out of explaining about the headaches.
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