Is Food Sensitivity Testing Reliable?

Like for a lot of other tests you might take or have taken in life, the accuracy of food sensitivity tests depends on well, the test! The classic food sensitivity/food allergy test looks for IgE or IgG antibodies to see if someone has been exposed to a food that has caused their body to create an antibody. What it doesn’t test for is if the person actually becomes symptomatic when exposed to this food. Elizabeth Yarnell at EffortlessEating suggested a great metaphor for understanding what the test results mean: since the classic test can tell you if there are antibodies present, it’s like knowing there’s a gun in the room, but the test won’t tell you if that gun has been fired or not.

To remedy this issue, ALCAT test was developed in the early 1980s by a team led by Dr. Mark Pasula. The ALCAT is the first test to look at the release of inflammatory markers called mediators, instead of the antibodies. But after a while, Dr. Pasula was unsatisfied with the results. He thought there could be a better method of testing, but this created a bitter difference of opinion. Unable to continue working with the same people, he split with the team to try developing a more accurate and reliable test. Did he succeed?

Dr. Allen Bonnilla, D. C. of Los Angeles decided to put Dr. Pasula’s new test, the MRT, to the test (pun intended!) to find out once and for all which one would be the most accurate. In order to do so, he took blood samples from his patients who suffer from food allergies and ran three ALCAT tests and three MRT tests on each sample. He made a video of the experiment that clearly shows the results. In it, it’s plain to see that the MRT results were very consistent through all the trials of the same sample, where the ALCAT test shows quite radically different results in each trial of the same sample.

Read the entire article here: The MRT vs the ALCAT: Is Food Sensitivity Testing Reliable?