Are you sure it isn't just salt that's doing that to you?

There's more nitrate in bacon than in plain pork belly to be sure, but there's actually not much of it, and the amounts you need to consume to have a vasoconstrictive effect seems high. Meanwhile: bacon (along with all cured meat and fish) is one of the very saltiest things we eat. Lots of people are salt-sensitive. This is probably what virtually all claims of "Chinese restaurant syndrome" (MSG sensitivity) turned out to be.

You should have no trouble finding pork belly. Try an experiment: just make your own bacon by filling a pan with kosher salt and pushing each side of the pork belly into it until they're all evenly and aggressively covered. Wrap the meat in plastic wrap, dump the pan, and put the meat back in it; leave it in the fridge for 3-4† days. Rinse it off and slice it. See if you get a headache from eating it.

(Home-cured bacon is good but if you don't add some of the carcinogen back to the cure, it's not safe to keep much longer than fresh meat is).

† That's a light cure, but long enough for this experiment, and if you're new to baconing and don't know what to look for, under-cured is better than over.

I am actually sure. I eat salt daily. I'll try that with the pork belly because it sounds delicious.

The big footnote missing from my post is that I'm celiac. I've done a ton of trial and error to find foods that cause me problems. I basically eat chicken (seasoned with salt and pepper) and rice (with butter) everyday. I only drink water and unsweetened vanilla almond milk. My snacks are popcorn and salted potato or corn chips. On this diet I don't get sinus headaches.

No one likes to hear it, but I've isolated monosodium glutamate as a trigger too. It's in a ton of flavored chips that I ate thinking they'd be fine for me.

Give me a month to try this. I'll let you know how it turns out.

You eat salt daily, of course, but you're never eating so much concentrated salt as you are when you eat any significant amount of bacon. I'm not suggesting that you're so sensitive that the amount of salt you get from a salt shaker, or from seasoning a steak or a burger before cooking it, is going to set you off. There's so much salt in the bacon that it dramatically alters the texture of the meat!

You also believe yourself to be sensitive to MSG, but the common thread between the foods that are causing you symptoms might not be a pair of poorly-observed sensitivities, but rather that the foods that trigger you tend to be very salty.

It doesn’t seem like much sodium per Google.

https://www.google.com/search?q=bacon+nutritional+value&rlz=...

but then you pour salt on it when cooking. I mean who eats saltless bacon? Gross. Why would you even bother.

Anyway this stuff really doesn't matter. People have been attacking foods since I was a baby. It's nearly always lies. Literally every single thing that you can eat has been attacked as being fattening, cancer causing, or "bad for you" and 99.999999% of the time there is zero science behind it.

For example people to this day claim that aspartame is poisonous even tho it is most definitely not. And now those same people attack Splenda. The fact is none of them know what they're talking about and they're unhappy with their lives so they don't want you enjoying yours. So they attack your foods. This has been going on at least my entire life but probably much longer than that.

You talk about science behind things like we have 100% knowledge. There is no science in celiacs and sinus headaches, but many celiacs report them.

Our knowledge of food is super limited. Our medicine is super limited when it comes to auto immune disorders.

My headaches don't exist according to science, but I dealt with them for 23 years and figure out a fix. Keep your mind open a bit, we don't have everything figured out and people's experiences are very real.

"Our knowledge of food is super limited."

You mean your knowledge. The scientific world knows a lot about how food works and what it does to the human body. It could know more, but because our medical research is driven by profit motive instead of "the greater good", food research is low on the totem pole. The interference of corporations such as the subject of this story certainly hasn't helped the situation.

For example, General Mills is probably the most guilty single-party with regards to the diabetes and obesity epidemic, but nobody is holding them responsible. We should be. If corporations and their executive leadership were punished for the terrible things they do to our civilization, they would possibly take care to be more responsible in the future.

I'm a bit late here, but I am wondering if you've considered the possibility that your sinus headaches are actually migraines? The two are often confused because they present similarly, and it is believed amongst headache and migraine experts that most so-called sinus headaches are actually migraines. It would explain the MSG trigger, too.

I am guessing that you've been tested for Celiac. If not, see my post from a few months back; i had a hyper sensitivity to gluten for over 3 years and found a fix: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15699841

That's awesome that you got that cleared up.

I have (had?) fructose malabsorption. I could digest sugar fine, but high fructose foods (HFCS, apples) not so well. My theory is being celiac my body attacked my small intestine and messed up digestion there. It could have been a gut bacteria problem, but I saw that more as a symptom of the underlying disease.

I didn't even mind that part so much. Sinus headaches were killing me. I thought I had brain cancer. Cutting out foods that trigger those has been my quest over the last 5 years and I have a pretty good handle on it now. Apparently chronic sinusitus is common in celiacs and it's pretty understudied. [1]

1. http://www.aaaai.org/ask-the-expert/coeliac-disease-sinusiti...