Rebecca Seal

is that because the symptoms aren't necessarily really severe, and sometimes people avoid these products just because they feel a little bit better, they can play a bit fast and loose with their dietary restrictions.

And so you get this sort of grey area where sometimes, say, a restaurant doesn't quite understand the difference between an intolerance and an allergy, and that can make it really hard for people with allergies to get taken seriously in some contexts.

And that's where there's a little bit of, I would say, beef between the intolerant community and the allergy community, both of whom are having a really rough time.

There are a lot of different ways that you can supposedly test for an intolerance.

Lactose is the only thing that you can technically test for.

That's a hydrogen breath test or a stomach biopsy.

So those are big time tests that you do with the doctor.

All other intolerance tests do not work.

They're not scientifically validated and the data and results that you get after taking them are junk.

So there's a full range.

You can do IgG blood testing.

You can have your hair

hair tested.

And you can also do things like biomagnetic resonance testing.

And there are various ones which are kind of homeopathically based.

And even one where you have to hold an allergen or something you're intolerant to in your mouth.

And then you have electric currents pass through your body to see what the resistance is to those currents.

And if you think that sounds unscientific, that's because it is deeply unscientific.

I just ran a bunch of them myself on the same day, which meant I had blood test lancets in the tip of almost every finger that I own.

So I did a gold standard allergy test, an ALEX2 test, which tests for 295 different allergens and should only be done with a doctor because it still has a high risk of false positives.