Your Complete Functional Medicine Guide To At-Home Food Intolerance Testing

How does at-home testing work?

When you find a test you want to try, 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 but it is also less expensive. You do 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.

Do home tests work?

Each test presents the results in its own way, but in general, you will receive a list of foods that the test has determined are causing some level of reactivity in your system. You could just quit eating the foods on the list, but many people want a professional to help them with what to do next, especially when the list of reactive foods is long. 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 isn’t necessarily a legitimate sensitivity to every single food on the list, but an overall lack of gut health and an overreaction of the immune system to many foods that may not be a problem when your body is less inflamed and aggravated.

In my experience, when patients retake these tests months later, they may get different results because labs are snapshots in time. If your health and lifestyle have changed, your results are likely to change, too. 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 any given day, your immune system could 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 in the short term, and changes in health over the long term.

So what do you do if your results reveal many food sensitivities? This is when I recommend rotating the foods you eat, to keep your immune system more calmed and balanced by avoiding eating one food too often. My goal as a functional medicine practitioner is not to have patients just avoid every food that shows a positive reaction in a test, but to 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. Also, I recommend actively working on improving your gut health – this is generally a good idea anyway, but it can certainly help to reduce immune system reactivity. Later, when health improves, chances are good that many of the foods on that long list can be successfully re-introduced.

Another thing to consider is how you will respond to your test results. If you see that you have numerous food sensitivities detected by an at-home test kit, will this lead to more stress and anxiety for you? Will you worry that you can’t eat anything 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.

Who should take these at-home tests?

DIY food testing labs can provide you with 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 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, or for people who have already cleaned up their diets but are still having some symptoms. Information about specific foods to avoid for a while can jumpstart your healing. A direct-to-consumer microbiome test like Viome can add further information. Together with food tests, they can give you a good overall look at the landscape of microbiome.

Bottom line: These tests can still give you enough information to start cleaning up your diet, even if you aren’t yet ready to consult a professional.

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