Rebecca Seal

And so that's the gold standard.

I tested that against a very well-known allergy and intolerance test that I bought online for a couple of hundred quid.

And then I did hair testing as well.

And in principle, I should have had all of the same results, which is nothing.

But that's not what I got.

So the hair test science is a little vague.

They just say that if they take a lock of your hair, they can test it for intolerances.

There's not really much information about exactly how that's done.

The blood tests do use a lot more scientific language.

However, they are testing for something called IgG, immunoglobulin G, which is one of the five classes of antibodies that the body produces.

It is absolutely unrelated to whether we are intolerant of a food.

IgE is a blood test that we do for allergies because immunoglobulin E is what we create in the blood when we have an allergy.

And so it's one of the markers that doctors use in order to diagnose an allergy.

IgG actually goes up in the bloodstream when we are more tolerant of a food.

And yet it is what these companies are testing for, which I think shouldn't be allowed.

OK, the allergy tests were all normal, but the IgG tests were quite interesting.

So according to them, I shouldn't eat eggs or dairy.

But I also had IgG responses to cardamom, bay leaf, cuttlefish, mulberry, roo bosh, chamomile, green tea, juniper, tapioca and venison, as well as sugarcane.

I'm going to say that's quite a random list of food.

It would be random, except that a couple of days before I did the test, I took my husband out for a seven course lunch as a birthday surprise.