286 foods tested individually. That includes the spices in your kitchen, the superfoods in your morning smoothie, the mushroom coffee, the meat glue in your restaurant steak, and the insect protein in your new protein powder. IgG reactivity doesn’t care about your food’s wellness credentials.
There are two types of immune-mediated food reactions that are commonly confused. IgE reactions are immediate-type classical allergies — the peanut that causes anaphylaxis, the shellfish that produces urticaria within minutes. These are well understood, clinically significant, and diagnosed through IgE allergy testing and skin prick tests.
IgG to foods is different, and much less certain. IgG is the antibody class behind long-term immune memory, and IgG to a food mostly reflects that you eat it: people with no symptoms have it too. Allergy bodies (EAACI, AAAAI, CSACI) advise against using it to diagnose food sensitivity. So this panel doesn’t diagnose anything on its own. We use it for one job: to choose which foods go into a monitored elimination-and-reintroduction trial.
The usual explanation goes like this: when the gut lining is leakier than it should be, food proteins cross it, the immune system makes IgG against them, and repeated exposure keeps up a low-grade inflammation that shows up hours or days later as fatigue, bloating, joint pain, headaches or skin problems.
Evidence: mechanistic and untested. Whether food-specific IgG causes symptoms has not been shown. The delayed “2 to 72 hours” reaction window you’ll see quoted elsewhere has no study behind it that I can find. What has been tested is the practical question: does leaving out IgG-flagged foods help? One randomised trial says it may, modestly (below).
That’s why the trial, not the antibody level, decides whether a result matters.
IgG detected at a low level. Noted against your history; usually stays in your diet.
Moderate IgG. A candidate for the 12-week trial below, depending on how often you eat it and your symptoms.
Highest IgG. Goes into the 12-week trial below, then back in one food at a time.
How the classes are used here: Class 3 goes into the trial, Class 2 depending on how often you eat it, Class 1 usually stays in. This is my practice rule. The lab’s IgG classes haven’t been tested against outcomes (evidence grade: none).
IgG food testing is not a test for allergy, and a raised result is not proof a food is a problem. It’s a shortlist. What you do with it is what counts.
Leave out the panel-flagged foods for a 12-week trial (the length used in the one randomised trial, Atkinson 2004, Gut, PMID 15361495). Then reintroduce one food every 3 days: a small portion on day 1, a normal portion on day 2, none on day 3, with a daily symptom diary. If symptoms return, stop that food and wait until they settle before testing the next; retry it once after 3 months. A food that causes no reaction goes back in for good. Evidence: one RCT in IBS (mixed); the reintroduction steps are practice, modelled on staged FODMAP reintroduction, not trial-tested for IgG.
No routine retest of the IgG panel. IgG to a food falls when you stop eating it, so a lower result after the trial tells you nothing the diary hasn’t already. The diary is the answer.
Atkinson and colleagues randomised 150 people with IBS to a diet leaving out the foods they had raised IgG to, or a sham diet leaving out the same number of other foods, for 12 weeks. The IgG-guided diet reduced symptom scores by 10% more than the sham diet. In people who stuck to it fully, the difference was 26%. Symptoms got worse again when the diet was relaxed.
Grade: mixed. One randomised trial, in IBS only, with a modest effect, and not repeated at scale. It supports a monitored trial. It doesn’t support treating an IgG result as a diagnosis.
Atkinson W, Sheldon TA, Shaath N, Whorwell PJ. Food elimination based on IgG antibodies in irritable bowel syndrome: a randomised controlled trial. Gut 2004;53(10):1459–64. PMID 15361495. doi:10.1136/gut.2003.037697
Gluten: if gluten is a suspect, test for coeliac disease (tTG-IgA with total IgA) before removing it. The test needs gluten in the diet: NICE’s coeliac guideline (NG20) asks for gluten in more than one meal a day for at least 6 weeks beforehand. Your GP can arrange it.
Immediate reactions: swelling of the lips or throat, hives, wheeze or feeling faint within minutes to two hours of eating is an IgE allergy question. That’s for your GP or an NHS allergy clinic, not this panel.
Red flags: blood in your stool, weight loss you can’t explain, difficulty swallowing or night-time symptoms go to your doctor first, not into an elimination diet.
The difference between allergy, intolerance and sensitivity is set out in Food sensitivity, food allergy, food intolerance: three different things.
The standard IgG food sensitivity panel used by most UK practitioners tests approximately 190 foods. The HealthBeings IgG food panel (286 foods) tests 50% more. The clinical argument for breadth is straightforward: IgG reactivity does not limit itself to commonly tested foods. The immune system responds to what crosses the gut barrier — which is every food consumed regularly, regardless of its health credentials.
Where the standard 190-marker panel focuses on staple foods — the wheats, dairy proteins, common proteins, and primary fruits and vegetables — the HealthBeings IgG food panel (286 foods) extends into the territory that wellness culture has enthusiastically expanded into without ever testing: superfoods, functional mushrooms, herbal supplements, insect proteins, food additives, and the full range of spices. This is where clinically significant reactions are most likely to be missed entirely by standard panels.
286 foods, each tested individually. The groupings below are ours, to make the list readable — they are not the laboratory’s categories, and the full itemised list comes with the report.
The superfoods and novel ingredients on this panel are exactly the foods the wellness industry promotes most enthusiastically and tests least rigorously for individual reactivity. Spirulina, chlorella, maca root, ginkgo, ginseng, guarana, baobab, aronia, wakame, nori, dandelion root, chia seed, almond milk, aloe — these are in daily use in health-conscious households and almost entirely absent from standard IgG panels.
The logic is simple: IgG reactivity develops to foods consumed regularly, regardless of their health credentials. A superfood consumed daily is a repeated antigen exposure. If the gut barrier is compromised, that daily superfood is a daily exposure the immune system keeps meeting. Testing it isn’t cynicism about superfoods. It’s clinical thoroughness.
Three insect proteins are also included: house cricket, mealworm, and migratory locust. With EU novel food approvals granted for cricket flour and mealworm protein, insect protein is appearing in protein powders, flour blends, and processed foods with increasing frequency. One caution that sits outside this test: people with a shellfish allergy can react to insect protein, because both carry tropomyosin. That is an IgE allergy question, not an IgG one — if it applies to you, it needs allergy testing, and this panel is not a substitute.
Standard IgG panels test 5–10 spices at most. This panel tests them individually — pepper, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, cardamom, turmeric, ginger, lemongrass, mustard, cinnamon, clove, anise, caraway and more.
The reasons: spices are consumed multiple times daily across every meal without being identified as a food category. They are considered health foods — turmeric, ginger, and cinnamon are staples of the anti-inflammatory dietary movement. Few people would think to include their daily golden latte or curry base in an elimination trial.
Fenugreek and coriander reactivity is particularly worth noting — both are in most South Asian cooking and most curry powder blends. If someone eats them several times a day and they come back Class 3, they go into the trial like any other flagged food. The result is a lead, not a verdict.
Most IgG panels test “cow’s milk” as a single antigen. This is clinically imprecise because cow’s milk contains multiple distinct proteins with different properties, different heat stability, different distribution across dairy products, and therefore different dietary implications if reactive.
Casein (Bos d 8) is the primary protein in cheese and yoghurt. It is heat-stable and found in most dairy products including those where whey has been removed. Reactivity to casein means most conventional dairy needs to be eliminated, including hard cheeses and many dairy-free alternatives that use casein as a binding agent.
Beta-lactoglobulin (Bos d 5) is the major whey protein. It is denatured by heat, meaning fermented and aged dairy products (hard cheeses, kefir, yoghurt) may be better tolerated than fresh milk and whey protein supplements. A client reactive to beta-lactoglobulin but not casein can potentially retain aged cheese and tolerate A2 milk differently from standard pasteurised milk.
Alpha-lactalbumin (Bos d 4) is also a whey fraction but is present in breast milk — relevant for clients with infant feeding histories and potentially for mothers with reactive infants responding to maternal dairy intake.
This level of protein-fraction specificity produces genuinely different dietary guidance. Testing “dairy” as a single antigen and telling a client to “avoid dairy” is a blunt instrument when the actual pattern might be “avoid casein, tolerate goat and sheep dairy and aged cheeses.”
M-transglutaminase is an enzyme used in food manufacturing to bind pieces of meat, fish, and other proteins together into uniform portions. It is used in processed meat products, catering and restaurant portion cuts, imitation crab, restructured shrimp, and standardised protein products. As a processing aid it may not appear by name on a label, and in restaurants there is no label to read.
If M-transglutaminase comes back raised in someone who eats a lot of restaurant or processed meat, the trial is to leave out bound and formed meat products while keeping whole cuts. Whether IgG to this enzyme causes symptoms is untested, like every other food on the panel.
IgG doesn’t read the health claims on the packaging. If you eat spirulina every day, it belongs on the list of things to check, the same as bread.
The HealthBeings IgG food panel (286 foods) is Test Four of the TDG Five-Test Programme. It is interpreted alongside rather than in isolation from the other four results — because IgG reactivity is a consequence of context as much as it is a finding in itself.
GI-MAP + IgG: Findings on GI-MAP consistent with barrier stress — low secretory IgA, raised inflammatory markers, dysbiosis — make a permeability explanation for widespread IgG reactivity more plausible, but no more than that (mechanistic and untested). No stool marker, zonulin included, measures permeability directly; here is why.
DUTCH + IgG: Long-term stress hormones can lower secretory IgA, and that is one proposed route to sensitisation. It’s a mechanism, not a tested link, so the two results are read side by side rather than as cause and effect.
OAT + IgG: A raised yeast marker on the OAT alongside IgG to baker’s or brewer’s yeast is worth noting together. Neither confirms a yeast problem on its own.
Blood chemistry + IgG: hsCRP is a general marker of inflammation with many causes. A raised hsCRP alongside several IgG results doesn’t show the foods are the cause; the trial is how that gets tested.
The HealthBeings IgG food panel (286 foods) is included in the TDG Five-Test Programme alongside DUTCH Plus, GI-MAP, Metabolomix+, and comprehensive blood chemistry. Ask the DH Concierge what IgG food sensitivity testing would reveal in the context of your symptoms.
Includes the HealthBeings IgG food panel (286 foods), home collection kit, laboratory analysis, a written interpretation against your history and symptoms, and a structured reintroduction plan.
A test result on its own tells you very little. The interpretation is the point — which reactivities matter, which are incidental, what to remove, and in what order to bring things back.