It costs $199 and Pinnertest costs $490 Everlywell screens for 96 common foods, while Pinnertest screens for 200. Everlywell also sells other at-home medical tests, but their food intolerance test is the best-seller. Everlywell recently received a one million dollar investment from Shark Tank, and raked in $6 million in sales last year, Stat wrote. And despite who’s vetting them, they’re selling well.
And how it can get on the market, and be sold, with these claims, is very disturbing.”Īll the food intolerance tests are considered “laboratory-developed tests, and are therefore not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration,” StatNews recently reported. This type of test is basically totally inappropriate. “And it certainly doesn’t mean you should avoid exposure to them, or avoid eating them. “But it doesn’t mean that you are sensitive or intolerant to those,” Hamilton says. The fact that I had IgG antibodies in my blood could be telling me what I already know: I'm eating these foods regularly. Those were foods I only started to eat a lot of after my Pinnertest eliminations (walnuts and sunflower seeds in place of almonds and peanuts). A whole bunch of new foods had popped up, including walnuts, sunflower seeds, and cashews. That rang true for me: A couple weeks ago, I also took an Everlywell test to compare the results to my Pinnertest. “This type of food sensitivity test is essentially a bogus test.” He says that the presence of IgG antibodies for a certain food in my blood could merely mean I was recently exposed to it, not that I was sensitive in any way. He didn’t his mince words: “There is no firm, peer reviewed data that verifies that IgG antibody is diagnostically useful,” he tells me. I asked Robert Hamilton, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University who runs a diagnostic allergy laboratory, what the deal was. It’s been a long debate as to whether IgG antibodies, a different kind antibody than IgE, have anything to do with predicting food intolerances. But wait, food intolerance tests, like Pinnertest and Everlywell, also look for an antibody: IgG. A basic way the AAAAI differentiates the two is that food intolerances involve the digestive system and food allergies involve the immune system. But migraines, fatigue, eczema, and head fog have also been attributed to food intolerances. They’re described by the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology as “when a person has difficulty digesting a particular food.” The symptoms are mostly stomach-related, like intestinal gas, abdominal pain or diarrhea. In severe cases, anaphylaxis can occur.įood intolerances have a murkier definition. If you’re genetically predisposed to be allergic to a food, when you encounter it, your immune system produces Immunoglobulin E, or IgE, antibodies, which travel to cells that release chemicals that cause the allergic reaction: itchiness or tightness in the throat, nose, mouth and airways.
Allergies are a specific adverse reaction to a substance, which can be food, medicine, or venom, and they can be life threatening (think: kid you went to elementary school with who always carried an Epi-pen). This is the true danger of these tests: not just that they could be incorrect, or have kept me from PB&Js for a whole year, but that they can be a sand trap for anyone with disordered thoughts and fears around eating.Īm I ever going to eat an oatmeal raisin cookie again?Ī food intolerance is not the same thing as a food allergy. And so, I’m ashamed to say, I still didn’t eat oatmeal for breakfast. Take me, for instance: I don’t think I’m actually intolerant to the foods from my results.īut getting test results that showed that my immune system had made an antibody called Immunoglobulin G, or IgG, in response to peanuts, oats, almonds, and egg whites, it was hard not to feel wary of those foods. While they’re being promoted through attractive filters online, the people who take them are left with long lists of foods that they’re supposed to eliminate and confusion about what a food intolerance really is. Yet scientists and allergists say that the science behind these tests is shaky at best, and completely misleading at worst. Other food intolerance tests have recently popped up too one called Everlywell started showing up in my feed alongside perfectly plated food, manicured nails, and an assurance that a simple blood prick could easily tell you what foods were causing your stomach upset. It was being marketed by health and wellness influencers, and many celebrities have lent their faces and accounts to the test as well. I first encountered Pinnertest while scrolling through Instagram.
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