Taking a Food Sensitivity Test

I’ve never been diagnosed with a food allergy. However, I do know that I get a lot of upset stomachs. This causes me to eat very bland foods, but even then, I often feel sick after eating. Then, while listening to a podcast, I heard an ad for a company called Everlywell. This company sells lab kits which test for everything from food sensitivities and metabolism to vitamin deficiencies and sleep issues. Like a genealogy test, they send you the kit, you provide a blood sample, then you mail it back, and they email you the results. Here is my experience taking Everlywell’s food sensitivity test.

Please note, Everlywell is not an affiliate of mine. This is something I tried completely on my own. I will not receive a commission for any products sold as the result of clicking on the links in this post.

Buying a food sensitivity kit from Everlywell

Knowing that most online companies hold sales during the holidays, I decided to wait until Black Friday to see if the kits went on sale. And I was right. Everlywell’s kits were between 25%-30% off, depending on how much you spent. So, I got a bit of a discount on my Food Sensitivity test.

Now, I made the mistake of thinking that a food sensitivity test tests for food allergies. As usual, I didn’t read the fine print. A food sensitivity is not the same as a food allergy.

This kit measures your Immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibody against 96 different foods and determines which ones are giving you the delayed symptoms that you are experiencing. These include:

• fatigue
• bloating
• GI distress
• headaches/migraines
• stomach pain
• bloating
• indigestion

I experience all of these symptoms after eating and have pretty much my whole life. But I never break into a rash or have breathing issues like you’d expect with a food allergy. My symptoms were also mild enough that I felt I could rule out food intolerance, such as celiac disease and lactose intolerance.

So, it was a happy accident that this test measured the symptoms I have rather than the far-fetched notion that I’ve suddenly become full on allergic. I ordered a kit on Black Friday, and it showed up in my mailbox on Monday. So, now it was time to test my blood.

Taking a blood sample

The Everlywell test comes in a little box with an instruction card, the blood sample card, two needles, an alcohol pad, and a bandage. Yes, you do have to draw your own blood. So, if you’re squeamish about blood, this is not the test for you.

It looks intimidating when the materials are all laid out, but there are both written instructions and a link to an online video that you can watch to walk you through the process. First, you have to get your blood flowing by running your hands over warm water and then shaking them dry. Then, you sterilize the tip of the inside of your ring finger with the alcohol swab.

Next, you have to puncture the skin with one of the needles. It’s in a little plastic tube they call a lancet. They provide you with two lancets, but you just need to poke one side of one finger once to get your sample.

At first, I thought my lancet was broken. I couldn’t see the needle, and when I pushed it down into my skin nothing happened. I decided to give it one more hard punch before I tried the other lancet, and without thinking, I pressed it down as hard and as fast as I could. Then, I felt the sting. It was a little startling, but it worked.

The blood poured out of the wound, but it wasn’t forming into the little drops that I needed to stain the sample card. The card contains five circles that need to be covered with blood.

Filling your blood sample card

You can’t touch the card with your skin to dab the blood onto it. You have to “milk” it so that it falls down onto the paper in little drops that completely cover each circle. It’s a little gory and tedious, but soon I was able to drop enough blood onto each circle on the paper.

Once I was finished, I covered my wound with bandage. I thought the bandage was a little overkill considering the size of the wound I needed to make, but it turns out, I needed it to stop the blood flow. The cut is small, but it doesn’t stop bleeding. The wound was sore for a day or two after, and the puncture wound was still visible over a week later.

After I let the card dry, I then had to fill out my information on the card and register my kit online so that Everlywell could link my kit to me and email me the results. Afterward, everything went back into the box it came in. There was also a USPS shipping label and a plastic mail bag to send it in. The next day, I dropped it in a mailbox. It was Tuesday morning, and I didn’t expect to hear back from them for at least a week.

Waiting for the results

As early as Wednesday evening, I received an email saying that my sample had arrived at the lab and was being processed. The email said that I would have the results within 2-4 business days. So, I didn’t expect to hear anything until Friday at the earliest.

Then, on Thursday night, I received an email saying that my results were in. I just had to click on the link in the mail, login to my Everlywell account, and the results were there for me to review. What I saw was surprising.

My test results

I’ve had stomach issues since I was an infant. So, I’m no stranger to a stomach ache. However, these more severe symptoms that I had experienced were going on for over two months before I took the food sensitivity test. To combat these symptoms, I had been following the BRAT diet: bananas, rice, apple sauce, and toast. That seemed to help when my symptoms were at their worst.

I usually eat a salad at dinner, but over the past few months I found that eating raw vegetables would really trigger my symptoms. So, I was expecting lettuce or tomatoes to be the culprit.

Everlywell uses the following scale to measure your reactivity to the foods tested:

• normal reactivity: score between 0-17
• mild: 18-58
• moderate: 59-116
• high: >116

Here are my results. Out of the 96 foods tested:

• 88 foods measured at normal reactivity.
• 0 foods measured high.
• 3 foods measured moderate.
• 5 foods measured mild.

My moderately reactive foods

The highest reactive food on my scale was, incidentally, bananas, with a score of 101. I’d eaten practically a banana a day since September as part of my BRAT diet.

Next came pineapple with a score of 90. I like pineapple, but I don’t eat it very often.

Third place was coffee measuring at 62. I’m a tea drinker, but I do sometimes drink cappuccinos that I buy for my K cup machine. I also eat coffee-flavored ice cream if it’s the only option at a birthday party or other event, but I don’t buy it myself.

My mildly reactive foods

The five mildly reactive foods on my list were either in the mid to low range on the mild scale. These included

• Asparagus: score 36 – a vegetable I rarely eat
• Egg whites: score 35 – a food I eat often, mainly on the weekends for breakfast prepared in a variety of ways or hardboiled in sandwiches and salads.
• Garlic: score 28 – which I don’t use in its raw form or even often buy in cloves but is found in numerous sauces and dips that I use.
• Almonds: score 24 – I have been eating a lot of nuts lately but mostly peanuts, cashews, and pistachios. However, I had tried switching from cow’s milk to almond milk in the fall and found that my stomach symptoms were really bad during this time.
• Chicken: score 19 – I do eat a lot of chicken. But my score barely registered in the mild reactivity list. This one was a head scratcher.

Removing reactive foods from my diet.

Everlywell suggests one of three techniques for eliminating these reactive foods from my diet.

• The Quick Elimination Diet – Eliminate one food for four days. Then, eat one serving of this food. Wait 2-3 days, and see if any symptoms occur.
• The Phased Elimination Diet – eliminate only the high and moderate foods for 30 days. Then, eat one serving of one food at a time. Watch for symptoms for 2-4 days before trying another food.
• The Broad Elimination Diet – eliminate the mild, moderate, and high foods for 30 days. Then, eat one serving of one food at a time, and watch for symptoms before eating another food on the list.

According to Everlywell’s FAQ section, even the mild foods could be causing the worst symptoms. So I was right to be suspicious of almonds but not bananas.

My review of Everlywell

Overall, I’m happy with my experience with Everlywell. The kits are a little pricey ($159 for the food sensitivity test as of November 2019), but so is going to the doctor. I love that you can do this at your dining room table in just a few minutes and that the shipping is pre-paid so you don’t have to wait in line at the post office to mail it.

The package got there overnight, and the test results came in practically the next day. Their website is also easy to navigate, and it provides clear, detailed answers to all of your questions. You can even request a webinar for a more detailed breakdown of your results.

So, what will come of this test? Only time will tell as I eliminate these foods and then slowly add them back into my diet to figure out once and for all what is making me sick.

Do you have any food sensitivities? What symptoms do you have? Would you ever consider taking a food sensitivity test? Leave your answers in the comments below!

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