Eric Bakker the naturopath from New Zealand. Thanks for tuning in. I’m still here, and it’s 2020. Let’s talk about how you can test for food sensitivities. If you’re going to do a food allergy test, I would recommend you work with a company like I call Doctor’s Data. So Doctor’s Data, I think they say in American. And they’re based in Seattle, Washington State. I think they’re one of the best companies in the world for doing the ELISA test, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay test. So they take a small amount of your blood and all they want is the serum, the clear fluid out of that, and they test that. They match it up against 96 different foods. They’re checking for the IgE, which is the immediate antibody which can invoke a symptom within minutes or hours. And they also check for the IgG4, the delayed. There’s plenty of research and papers written and evidence produced that the IgG4 is a valid antibody. But still many scientists and on Wikipedia you’ll see that they don’t agree and they don’t list it.

I don’t care. Let me tell you, I’ve solved some really difficult cases by doing that test. One that always comes to mind was a young girl around six, five or six, with really bad skin rashes all over her body, bad eczema. We did a food allergy test and nothing showed. This is the IgE test.

The doctor’s scratch test showed nothing. And I was still convinced that there was an allergy going on. So we did an IgG test, the IgG, G for God, G4 test. And lo and behold, we found antibodies to milk and other foods, which of course, when we removed, the skin entirely resolved within 14 days. The skin was clear in two weeks, completely clear, only because we did the IgG test, the delayed marker. So there is a lot of merit in testing the full spectrum, especially for a child. So make sure that you do both the G and the E when it comes to the antibody serum. So that’s a straight-out blood test you can do.

So when I get patients or when I was practicing, when I got patients to do the test, I would usually get them to not have any antibiotics right up until then, and hopefully no medications, and to allow that child or that person to eat all, a whole broad range of foods, unless of course a food had serious reactions like a celiac or something. And then we would find what the food is.

A heads up for you for the test. When you get an antibody test back and you see antibody markers against a whole lot of foods, you don’t take all the foods out. You don’t do that. You only take out the foods with the highest possible category. So if you’re looking at a Doctor’s Data test, I believe you’ve got four or five categories of sensitivity, one being the highest category. Well, those are the foods that go. Two, being the second, you may want to take those out. But the remaining, you leave alone. Because once you take the kingpin out, generally the immune system backs off. And, if you want, you can retest again within three to six months. But don’t take every food out because it’s showing some type of antibody. That’s the wrong thing to do.

To me that’s like saying this guy next door is playing loud music, this one’s playing music that’s sort of okay. I’m not going to go around and take everyone’s stereo systems away from them just because one guy’s annoying the hell out of me. Normally, if I take that guy out, talk to this guy nicely, everything will calm down. Point I’m making is don’t be radical when it comes to making decisions what you do with your diet. Don’t all of a sudden take all of these foods out and replace with… Because your body is not really like a concrete cement maker. You can’t just throw whatever you want in it and take whatever you want out. Because you’ve got one thing that a cement mixer hasn’t got. You’ve got bacteria in your gut that you rely on. So you need to keep your diet intact, but just take those offenders out.

But what about the intolerance? What do you do there? How do you test for that? Because if it’s a non-allergy, you can’t just run an allergy panel. Well, if you’ve got a really strong problem with intolerances, the first thing that you do is take digestive enzymes. You don’t even test, you just take enzymes. Enzymes work quite well. And I recommend usually one or two capsules with each meal for a few weeks or a few months. And, in many cases, that will resolve the problem, especially if you haven’t got a super stressful lifestyle, occupation, or relationship. If you’re going through a divorce and you’ve got whatever, if you’ve got all these problems, there’s no point doing it. You’re better off waiting to resolve issues before you go ahead in your quest to really improve your GI function. It makes a lot of sense.

So I hope that gives you a few tips on what to test for. With the intolerances, just treat straight up. That usually fixes the problem. And with the allergies, if it’s bad, test. If not, use your brain and then withdraw some of the key foods. And we’ll talk about that after, about the key foods.