August 21, 2018

Food Sensitivity Testing at Home


As a dietitian, I have always been interested in food sensitivities. I have not noticed any sensitivities or intolerances to foods that I have but a lot of times with a sensitivity, you may not even notice it but when you eat these foods, your body may have a small reaction to it. I partnered up with Health Testing Centers to try one of their at-home food sensitivity tests and was so excited to give it a try.

I chose the ALCAT 100 Food Panel from the Vitamin and Nutrition category which is a food and chemical screening blood test that measures your sensitivity to 100 different foods. It does not test for food allergies and does not diagnose a disease. It can help with different conditions influenced by food sensitivities. Some of the foods that it tests sensitivities for is apples, banana, beef, cabbage, egg whites and yolks, cocoa, oats, peanuts, wheat and more.

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It was very simple to place an order for the test that I chose. It took me about 2 minutes in total to order the kit. The site has a ton of information about each product so that you really understand what you are ordering. After you place your order, your test kit gets mailed to you. The kit is small and I just kept it all together for when the blood draw happened.

You then receive a phone call to set up the blood draw collection (which is included in the price). You can either go to a place to get your blood drawn or have a phlebotomist come to your home. I chose to do it right in my home which was super easy and took a few minutes or less.

When your results are ready, you will receive an email with your results. I was excited to check out my results and to be honest, I was pretty surprised at my results!

Beef is on my list of moderate reaction foods.

Results of ALCAT 100 Food Panel

Foods with severe, moderate or mild reactions:

I was shocked that I had a reaction to the foods in the moderate category! As far as I know, I have not experienced reactions to these so I found the results very interesting. I eat apples all the time and I eat all of those foods regularly so I'm surprised. They recommend avoiding these foods for 3-6 months before reintroducing them.

The report gives information about what foods these ingredients can be found in. For example, if I choose to eliminate apples to see how my body reacts, I should also look for foods with apple juice concentrate and other ingredients like that. The report gives you tons of information which can be very helpful.

Foods with no reaction:
I also had no issues with gluten, candida or whey. I had a small reaction to casein. 

While I am not completely sure what I am going to do with my diet after learning these results, I do find it very interesting and if I was feeling poorly, I think that this test could be amazing for teaching you what you may want to avoid temporarily to see if it helps you feel better. 

There is tons of information available from Health Testing Centers so that I can better understand my results and I found the service great to use. I had no issues with shipping, getting my results or anything else. I would recommend it for food sensitivity testing.

**Health Testing Centers has a monthly newsletter on their website that you can sign up for and get 15% off your order as well as other discounts.

This post is in partnership with Health Testing Centers.

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