Rebecca Seal

I lined them all up on the table.

I thought the best way of doing it scientifically, although obviously I'm a study of one, was to do it all at the same time.

I'm apparently very sensitive to environmental allergens including bees, European beech, laburnum, primrose, tamarisk and wallflowers.

I don't have any allergies and I don't have any intolerances.

No, she was testing the tests themselves.

I want to show how ludicrous these tests are and how unfair it is that people are effectively being exploited because they're not cheap in many cases.

We're talking hundreds of pounds to buy a test online.

So an intolerance effectively is just your body saying, I can't deal with this.

I can't digest it.

So the primary symptoms are always in the gut or kind of very closely related to the gut.

Whereas an allergy is an immune system response.

So it is a kind of a full body response.

Obviously, with some allergies like hay fever, they're in sort of very particular areas of the body.

But the impact of an allergy is kind of system wide, whereas an intolerance is really just about how your stomach behaves.

I mean, it's actually really hard to tell because the data collection on allergy isn't particularly brilliant.

And it's probably even worse on food intolerances because we don't have kind of really clear definitions of what each intolerance looks like and what the symptoms might be.

And we also just have not great data collection on any of this stuff.

So gluten intolerance is obviously a really big one.

Lactose intolerance.

The difficulty with intolerances for the allergy community...