Blog

Demystifying Intolerance Blood Tests: Your Ultimate Guide

by Donna Mastriani on Jun 10, 2023

Food intolerance is a common occurrence that has risen in recent years, affecting more people worldwide. Food intolerance occurs when your body finds difficulty breaking down specific foods. Because of the rampant rise in food intolerance cases, many people are looking for food intolerance tests to help determine which food intolerances they suffer. When your body has difficulty breaking down food, we call that food intolerance. It often causes gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhoea, abdominal pain, and headache, among other symptoms. These food intolerance symptoms often persist until you've passed the food from your system and then stop affecting you. Usually, even though food intolerance isn’t severe, like food allergies, it can affect the quality of your life, which is less than ideal.

How intolerance blood tests work

Your blood plasma is full of antibodies, also commonly known as immunoglobulin. The role of immunoglobulin is to help keep your body protected against viruses, bacteria, and other harmful foreign invaders. Food Intolerances Explained

Antibodies can detect when foreign objects have invaded your body and trigger a protective response against your immune system cells. Among the different types of immunoglobulin, there is IgG. Since food intolerances aren't severe and it takes a while for the symptoms to appear, you'll have an IgG reaction. An IgG reaction means that your body is labelling that food as dangerous as soon as it enters the bloodstream. IgG antibodies attach themselves to specific food molecules and can act as markers. Markers notify your immune system that something "harmful" has invaded your body. For example, if you have caffeine intolerance, consuming a cup of coffee gets into your body and your digestive tract. Caffeine-specific markers will then identify that you've consumed something with caffeine and release specific IgG antibodies, marking caffeine as a problem for the body. Your immune system will then observe the IgG marks and release inflammatory chemicals into the body to help neutralise the threat made by caffeine. These chemicals can, therefore, cause sensitivity symptoms. So, when you take an Intolerance Test, the tests done against your sample in the lab can narrow down your food intolerances. Some other food intolerances cause more gastrointestinal issues because of what's happening in your colon. Usually, food gets broken down in the small intestines. However, if you have a food intolerance like lactose, this doesn't occur since you have insufficient lactase levels in your small intestines. So, when food isn’t broken down into molecules and absorbed into the bloodstream in the small intestines, it's pushed into the colon. In the colon, it sources much water, causing water retention, often resulting in bloating. Also, the colon contains bacteria that will ferment the food, causing gas production. This is why food intolerances like lactose often come with symptoms like abdominal pain, gassiness, constipation, and other intestinal symptoms. These symptoms will, however, stop affecting you as soon as you get that food out of your system.

The accuracy of intolerance blood tests

An intolerance test requires you to collect a sample of your blood and send it via mail to the lab for testing. Within seven days of the blood test getting to the lab, you'll receive your results via email. A blood test looks for food intolerance and checks for IgG and IgG4 antibodies in your blood after exposure to certain foods and elements in your environment. These tests accurately let you know foods that may be causing you problems. Once you get your list of foods, you can undergo an elimination diet. An elimination diet means you should remove the problematic foods from your diet for a few weeks and then reintroduce them slowly to see if you still have the same reaction. An elimination diet can also help you know your intolerance level to specific foods so you can eat only as much as you need and not too much such that you develop symptoms. This is good for you if there are specific foods you'd instead not take out of your diet. After an elimination diet, you'll also find that some foods no longer cause your symptoms and can tolerate them. However, if your doctor advises you to completely eliminate specific foods from your diet because of your intolerance level to them, you need to replace those foods with others. Replace the foods you're eliminating means finding a similar food that offers the same nutritional value as the one you're eliminating so that you don't get nutritional deficiencies. For example, eliminating milk and its byproducts from your diet can cause you to have a low-calcium diet, especially if you're on a vegetarian diet. So, even though you have lactose intolerance, you can choose to consume cow's milk labelled lactose-free or plant milk fortified with calcium. Noticing these differences in the foods you're eliminating and supplementing them accordingly will help your diet stay balanced and keep you from having deficiencies. If you stop consuming wheat, you must observe that wheat provides you with vitamin B and fibre. Finding alternative grains that provide the same will help you stay on top of things.

Final thoughts

Intolerance blood tests are an accurate way of knowing which items cause your body intolerance symptoms and which ones you can still use and consume. You can easily order an Intolerance Test online, have it delivered to your home, take the sample, and mail it back to the lab for testing. It's an easy process that doesn't require much from you apart from taking a blood sample and mailing it to the lab for testing. The minute you realise you suffer from intolerance symptoms, it's wise to take a test and get to the bottom of what's causing them. Blood tests are accurate and can help save you the trouble of always suffering from symptoms. You may need the help of your doctor when going on an elimination diet to make it successful.

Author: Donna Mastriani, S.N.H.S. Dip., Nutritionist / Care Manager

Donna has a diploma in Advanced Holistic Nutrition and 10 years customer service experience so is perfect as the Customer Care Manager, who manages the 24/7 team for global support.