Are At-Home Food Intolerance Tests Worth Your $$$? 

The exact reason these occur is more difficult to pinpoint. Some people can eat small amounts of these foods without experiencing any symptoms. When symptoms do occur, they may not be as immediate as allergies but can still be just as serious such as brain fog, chronic inflammation, bloating, digestive distress, and migraines.

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.

Once you place your order, a kit will be delivered straight to your home. Each kit will vary slightly, but generally they contain detailed instructions and the necessary instruments to complete the test. These results are gained through blood analysis, so a finger prick is required to conduct the tests. By looking at your levels of IgG antibodies to particular foods (immune reaction or reactivity), these tests are able to detect even low levels of IgG activity to determine which foods could be causing problems for you. These are the most common tests on the market.

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

When prospective patients send me their at-home food sensitivity lab results and I see numerous food reactivities, it often tells me that the problem is an overall lack of gut health and an overreaction of the immune system to these foods and has less to do with the foods that are positive themselves.

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. 

These at-home labs are a good, base-level window into how your immune system is reacting to foods. If you can't or don't want to work with a functional medicine practitioner right now, I see these labs as being beneficial for people who have tried healing their guts on their own but feel like they aren't getting anywhere or are stuck at a plateau. For people who have cleaned up their diet and have been focusing on gut health already but still feel like something is missing, it could find out that there are a few foods that they are sensitive to still, and removing those foods can help push them past that healing plateau. I also recommend direct-to-consumer labs like Viome, which can really give someone a good overall look at the landscape of their microbiome.

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.