We receive this question almost every week, usually after a video on Instagram or TikTok. The short answer: no, that’s not correct. We already wrote a blog post about it last year, which has since become one of the most visited pages on our site. Because new research has emerged since then, we’re providing an update here.
Where does histamine actually come from?
Histamine is not created by cooking. It forms when bacteria act on a substance in meat called histidine and convert it into histamine. This happens mainly when meat or bones are left at room temperature for too long, are not fresh enough, or are stored carelessly.
Once formed, histamine is not removed by cooking. But the cooking time itself does not create new histamine. Whether you simmer for two hours or thirty hours makes no difference in itself. What does matter is how fresh and hygienically handled your meat or bones were before they went into the pot.
Is meat more susceptible than bones?
If anything, the opposite is true. Meat, especially minced or marinated meat, provides more nourishment for bacteria than bones. Fresh or frozen bones contain less moisture and muscle tissue in which bacteria can grow. So presenting meat broth as a “safer alternative” is incorrect; the facts actually point in the opposite direction.
What’s new in 2025?
Until recently, research on histamine mainly focused on one question: how many milligrams per kilogram does a product contain? A study published this year asks a more interesting question: how much of that histamine does your body actually absorb?
Researchers compared two types of dried sausage, one with little histamine (357 mg per kilogram) and one with much more (1141 mg per kilogram, or more than three times as much). They then simulated digestion in the laboratory. The result: only 29 percent of the histamine from the sausage with a high histamine content became available for absorption by the body. For the sausage with little histamine, that figure was 72 percent. The difference on the label was therefore much greater than the difference that ultimately entered the body.
In other words, the figure in a laboratory analysis does not tell the whole story. The amount of histamine in a product is not automatically the same as the amount that ends up in your body.
A second publication this year, a major review of histamine in food, also confirms the pattern we already knew: fresh, quickly processed meat generally contains little to no histamine. The highest levels are found in products that are aged or stored for a long time, such as aged cheese, dried sausage, and spoiled fish.
One fair caveat: these two new studies focused on dried sausage, not broth itself. As far as we know, no study has yet done exactly the same thing with broth. What does apply across foods, and therefore to broth as well, is this: bacteria present before preparation determine the histamine content, not the preparation method itself.
Is histamine only found in meat, then?
No. Histamine also occurs naturally in certain plants, independently of bacteria or spoilage. Research particularly identifies eggplant, spinach, tomato, and avocado as plant products with notable histamine levels, although this varies considerably from one specimen to another.
Is it really that harmful?
Two things are often conflated here. The first is acute food poisoning caused by severely spoiled fish or meat, with histamine levels far above what you would normally consume. This is real and well documented, which is precisely why freshness matters.
The second is chronic histamine intolerance, in which normal amounts already cause symptoms. It does exist, but the evidence behind it is less robust than it is often presented online. Estimates suggest that approximately 3 to 6 percent of the population is affected, without a definitive diagnostic test. Research into the DAO gene, which is responsible for breaking down histamine, even found no clear difference in the occurrence of the suspected risk variants between people with symptoms and people without them. For most people, the amount of histamine in ordinary foods is simply not a problem.
Why does this myth keep circulating?
Because it sounds convincing and is easy to share. “Cooking for a long time is bad for you” is a simple message for a fifteen-second video. “It depends on how fresh your ingredients were before you started” is not.
The strange thing is that today we can verify for ourselves within a minute whether a claim is correct, using Google or a language model such as ChatGPT or Claude. Yet the most assertive video still often wins out over a simple check. Even if the video comes from a dietitian: having a large number of followers is not evidence, and repeating something without checking the source is still repeating something without checking the source.
What remains unchanged: our recommendations
- Always use fresh or immediately frozen bones.
- Never leave meat or bones at room temperature, not even briefly.
- Cool your broth quickly after cooking.
- Do not use leftovers of questionable quality, no matter how long you cook them.
What we do at HANT
We use only fresh, halal-slaughtered beef bones, which we freeze immediately upon receipt. After simmering, we heat our broth in an industrial autoclave, which improves food safety by eliminating any bacteria that may remain after packaging. We also have our broth tested by an accredited laboratory.
View the analysis report
View our bone broth
Sources
- Braga, D.E. et al. (2025). Dilute and shoot HPLC-fluorescence method for the quantification of free bioactive amines in dry-fermented sausage. Journal of Food Composition and Analysis, 141, 107340.
- Gloria, M.B.A. et al. (2025). Histamine in Brazilian Foods: A Comprehensive Review of Occurrence and Risk Assessment for Intoxication and Intolerance. Food Science & Nutrition.
- Matrix-dependent bioaccessibility of bioactive amines in Milano dry-fermented sausages after in vitro digestion (2025/2026), PubMed ID 42666533.
- US FDA, Fish and Fishery Products Hazards and Controls Guidance, 4th edition.
- EFSA Journal (2011), opinion on biogenic amines.