It’s an all too common occurrence: A patient comes to me with IBS that has been to a functional medicine doctor or other health practitioner who ran a food allergy test on him or her. My patient usually has been avoiding all the highly reactive foods or maybe even all the foods that came up as weakly reactive.
Unfortunately, I oftentimes find that my patient is not feeling much better on the new diet.
This can be frustrating – who wants to make all sorts of dietary changes with no benefit?
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had this test done on myself way back when I first sought out help for my IBS from a Naturopathic Doctor. In fact, I did it every year for 3 years!
Did I notice any difference eliminating the foods I was supposedly allergic to? Nope.
But I had no other leads as to how to help myself overcome IBS and so I continued doing the test.
The things that usually showed up were the things that I was eating. I stopped eating almonds because they came up on the first test and started eating flaxseeds. What came up on my next test? Flaxseeds! That was frustrating for sure. Here I was eating a healthy food that was showing up on my food allergy panel.
One of the most common things that comes up on a food allergy panel is allergy to eggs. There are very few patient reports that I ever remember seeing where the person did not have an allergy to eggs.
Needless to say, eggs were always positive on my reports and I enjoy my eggs very much today!
One more problem with these tests is something called cross reactions. For example, if someone has a latex allergy, for some reason they may show up as positive to banana or pineapple. Or, if a patient has high reactions to mushrooms, brewer’s or baker’s yeast, and sugar, the patient may have a candida overgrowth. Sometimes foods will show up on a panel that a person doesn’t even eat (like oysters!) and we have to suspect some sort of cross reaction or reason for it.
Despite my lack of improvement after food allergy testing, I decided to pursue a Naturopathic Medicine degree partly to get to the bottom of my digestive troubles, but also to help others gain freedom from IBS. While attending university, I learned about a study they did using food allergy testing where they sent split samples to a leading lab and got back different results. That was certainly discouraging given the amount of money that people pay for these tests. It’s hard to say whether the testing has improved because that was back in 2008.
This is not to say that some people have not benefited from these tests! They can be useful as a guide in an elimination diet. Meaning, you can remove the foods that you have antibodies to for several weeks and reintroduce each food one at a time to see if your body reacts. Oftentimes though, there are many other pieces to the puzzle of IBS that need to be addressed.
If you’ve been frustrated with your food allergy panel results and the lack of improvement, please consider my Freedom from IBS program! I’ve helped many women who were at a loss as to how to help themselves overcome IBS.
Please schedule a free consult with me so we can discuss how I can help you obtain Freedom from IBS!
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