Diet and Migraine: Is there a role?

Combining diet and lifestyle changes can often make a huge impact in control of migraine headaches. The traditional approach was to focus on migraine and try to identify triggers. Often this yielded poor results and patients gave up the diet factor as important. To better understand the role of diet one must focus on the goal of dietary intervention. This takes us away from diet for migraine per se to diet for specific comorbidities that can be treated. The result of treating these comorbidities leads to improvement of migraine. It addresses diet to help alter the “threshold” of migraine by exploring the relationship of migraine to insulin, gluten, and other factors. This can lead to improved migraine management by altering the migraine threshold: i.e. requiring more of a stimulus to initiate headache. The result is to reduce the negative impact of migraine on the individual patient.