Why food sensitivity panel testing is only part of the answer to your IBS

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 sensitivity 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.

That is because food sensitivity testing is only PART of the answer to your IBS.

I repeated this test once per year for 3 years. 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.

When the foods that you are eating show up on your food sensitivity test results, you likely have a leaky gut. We need to address your leaky gut and then you won't be developing these food sensitivities!

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.

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. When we address those other pieces, along with using the food sensitvity test as a guide, we often get much better results!

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!