Is a lack of “Food Diversity” making your migraine attacks worse?

A recent study took yet another look at migraine patients and their diet. This time, the focus was “dietary diversity”.

Research has shown again and again that diet is a key factor when it comes to migraine – and fighting migraine. New studies continue to try to find ways to explain the connection, and find the quickest ways for us to fight back using our daily food choices.

So what exactly is “dietary diversity”? No, it doesn’t mean (necessarily) that you have different colours of vegetables on your plate, or that you eat more than three kinds of apples each week. Basically, your diet is broken down into categories.

Think, for example, of the “MyPlate Plan” in the USA, or Canada’s “Food Guide“. In their simplest form, the idea is to encourage you to eat from a variety of “food groups”, and not just focus on high starch and sugars, or only dairy, and so on.

Dietary diversity tests use food groups such as fruits, roots and tubers, oil and fats, cereals, fish and seafood, dairy, and so on, to evaluate just how “diverse” a person’s diet is. How many different categories would you hit in a day, or a week?

So, back to the study. This study was specifically focused on women. Patients were professionally assessed for migraine, and then their migraine symptoms and disabilities were evaluated, along with some physical characteristics and so forth.

The study found that the dietary diversity score didn’t make much of a difference in migraine attack frequency. However, it did make a significant difference in headache severity, disability, and duration. In other words, attacks were worse in patients who didn’t eat regularly from a wide variety of food groups.

Also, patients with a higher dietary diversity score were more likely to have a slimmer waist.

This study doesn’t necessarily encourage a more “balanced” diet as compared to a diet more weighted towards vegetables or fats or meats – such as a vegan diet, or a keto diet. For one thing, the study didn’t go into that much detail. For another thing, even vegans and ketos (is that a word? Can I say that?) usually eat from a wide variety of food groups. And certainly the “official” dietary guides from various countries have had their share of criticism!

Remember, people serious about a healthy diet (whatever that looks like for them) will differ drastically from the person who eats at the same restaurant on the way home every day, or who buys the same canned food every week.

To make a conscious effort to look at labels and cook for yourself may be half or three quarters of the battle!

So what the study does seem to tell us is that eating a variety of foods on a regular basis is connected with less severe migraine attacks. It’s just another way to think about how to improve the way we eat, just a little bit at a time.

To read the study abstract, go to Association of dietary diversity score (DDS) and migraine headache severity among women.