Needless to say, understanding your individual food reactivity is a key step in managing your overall health regardless of whether your symptoms are severe and long-lasting or easily overlooked and short-lived. While there are many ways to uncover these food reactivities, one of the most definitive ways to clinically look at these is through lab testing. And with more people becoming educated on the importance of health, do-it-yourself wellness has risen in popularity. Pinner Test Food Intolerance Test ($380): This test looks at your response to 200 foods, making it one of the most comprehensive at-home kits on the market. EverlyWell Food Sensitivity Test ($159): This test is less comprehensive than the Pinner Test as it looks at your response to only 96 foods. You also have the option to upgrade to the Food Sensitivity Expansion Test, which will test an additional 88 foods. Food Sensitivity+ ($249.99): This option not only looks at your body’s response to different foods, but it takes it a step further and looks at the relationship your DNA has to your ability to digest certain foods such as caffeine. Cash Labs Food Sensitivity Test ($199): Like EverlyWell, this test looks at 96 foods. I have also seen over the years that retaking one of these tests months later, patients often see different foods showing up positive. Why? Labs are snapshots in time. The results for any lab, food sensitivity labs included, are looking at the specific day and time that the lab specimen was collected. Life and health are dynamic, so on a different day, the immune system may be behaving differently and reacting differently to different foods. And in the case of someone with multiple food sensitivities, their immune system is even more likely to have ups, downs, twists, and turns depending on the day. If you have many food sensitivities showing up on your test results, rotating the foods you eat, keeping your immune system more calmed and balanced, and actively working on improving gut health is generally a good idea. My goal as a functional medicine practitioner is not to have patients just avoid these positive foods in their lives but treat the underlying issues causing the sensitivities to flare up. Depending on how many foods are positive, I may have patients limit or avoid those foods for a time while actively working on healing the underlying gut-immune problems that are causing the reactions in the first place. Additionally, if there are numerous food sensitivities shown on an at-home test kit, this can add to the stress and anxiety for the person, as they think they can eat nothing but air and ice cubes. Stress and anxiety are not good for gut health, or health in general! For some people, labs like these without a qualified functional medicine doctor or coach can fuel food anxiety and eating problems like orthorexia, so if this feels like something you’d be predisposed to, I’d recommend avoiding them. Ultimately, for those not ready to work directly with a functional medicine practitioner, these can still give you enough information to start cleaning up your diet. My other recommendation, which is free for anyone? An elimination diet. For anyone who wants to start their journey of gut healing and finding food sensitivities on their own, an elimination diet is a great start that just about anyone can do. This way, you can explore for yourself how foods make you feel by giving your body some time focusing on gut healing foods, then slowly reintroducing potentially problematic foods for your gut one by one to see how you feel eating them again.
