We urge members to keep headache diaries to try and isolate triggers. Wont eliminate attacks, but it's sure nice to learn the sure fire triggers!

Joe

I discovered that onione, especially spring onion tops (aka "green" onions) are a cluster headache trigger for me, as well as leeks, and to a lesser degree white and red bulb onions.

I used to be able to eat all onions fine as a kid and through my teens, I was about 24 years old when I went to Greece and worked on an onion farm for a month. The farmer was a fanatic about onions, so I adopted a spring (aka green onions) onion rich diet, and had it in lots of tabouleh salads and soups. A few months later I started to get the beginnings of cluster headaches, and then about a year later full blown ones. I removed things that were relatively new to my diet at that time--parsley, milk, wheat, feta cheeze, lots of red wine, new kinds of chocolate, new herbs and spices. It was a pain in the ass and I wasn't very consistant.

I finally realized it could be onions when I was about 30, as I was eating an onion sandwich and looking out my window into my spring onion garden, I started to get a headache. I then cut onions out of my diet, and the headaches slowly went away for good, returning occasionally, but I could always trace it to when  someone would slip onions into my food or I ate some anonymous looking soup.

I travelled to Indonesian and India, and that was real bad with regard to cluster headaches for the forst couple weeks, until I figured out what foods have onions and which don't.

Cooking them doesn't do any good. But garlic seems to be fine with me.

I wonder why I was fine when younger but have cluster headaches with onions now---I think I just over did it with onions in my mid-20's. I really did eat an ass load of them for a few years.

It's been about 4 years since I cut onions out of my diet, but my sensitivity to them doesn't seem to have diminished.

I hope this is useful for somebody. What a good forum!

--A