Nutrismart Is A 30-Minute DIY At Home Food Sensitivity Test

Nutrismart is a pretty revolutionary product. The German engineered Nutrismart Food Acceptance Rapid Test kit allows you to to test your tolerance to 40 foods AT HOME and get your results in 30 MINUTES. No doctor’s office, no waiting around, no mailing your samples back and forth…Instead you get immediate gratification and can begin to adjust your diet the very same day in order to take into account your personal food intolerances. All of this for a HKD 1, 250 price tag. Wow indeed.

The process is pretty straightforward: you prick your finger, and use a  collection dropper to add a few drops of your blood into the fluid port on the test device. You then follow the kit instructions, which involves transferring vials of colored liquids in choreographed steps at specific time intervals such as getting first and second reaction rounds and adding a color reagent (so the results will show up).

If this sounds complicated and lengthy, it’s not. It it a simple process with very clear, foolproof instructions. Did we mention Nutrismart is a German company? You can conduct the tests in the privacy of your own home or you can visit the Greenamics office (Nutrismart’s exclusive Hong Kong distributor) and they will sort you out at no extra charge. All very handy.

The kit ingeniously fits a lot of information into one small display device, with 20 little rectangular panels that show three lines, one is the baseline, and then each panel will show you the result for two specific foods. The darker the results lines, the bigger the sensitivity. It sort of reminded us of a pregnancy test: you wait for a line to show and you find out that that wheat belly is all about.

The kit helps you identify food intolerances for what they deem to be the 40 most common foods and food groups, many of which are known for being troublemakers in the food intolerance community. The kit tests for wheat, soy, yeast, peanuts, almonds, kiwi, egg whites, egg yolks, casein, cow’s milk, tomatoes, coffee, cacao and beef among many others.

The test works by testing for special markers in your blood that show your body has reacted to a specific substance. Whenever your body comes into contact with a foreign substance, be it pollen or a virus, it produces an antibody. There are many different types of antibodies (or immunoglobulins, that’s the Ig in IgG/IgE), each of which is designed to interact with one, and only one, foreign invader. This is often referred to as a lock-and-key interaction.

Common allergies are caused by a type of antibody called IgE. These are the buggers responsible for hay fever, and peanut allergies, and that terrible feeling caused when IgE triggers the release of histamines. IgE allergies are serious and the body’s reaction to proteins and/or allergens in the food are immediate. These can include breaking out in rashes, severe wheezing, eye swelling, etc. In fact, some IgE-related allergies are potentially fatal and can induce anaphylactic shock, requiring an EPI pen shot or something similar.

Separately from IgEs, there are intolerances that you can think of as a kind of hardware malfunction on your body’s side: it’s missing a special piece of equipment. For example when you suffer from lactose intolerance, it’s because your body does not have the enzyme lactase, which is what breaks down lactose and enables people to digest it.

Finally you have IgG antibodies. The presence of these does not indicate allergies, as per the clinical medicine definition, and your reaction will probably not be immediate. These type of food intolerances, or food sensitivities, have more to do with your body’s inability to digest and process a specific food. When suffering from food intolerances, your body may experience a range of symptoms including bloating, headaches, nausea, loose stools, insomnia, acne, eczema and more. The foods you have eaten have somehow managed to get into your blood stream, usually due to a condition like leaky gut or Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). The NutriSmart kit lets you know if you have IgG antibodies related to regularly consumed foods present in your blood.

So how do you know if you are intolerant? The darker the line, the more likely your body is very sensitive to the food specified. If you are curious about Green Queen’s results, we manifested the darkest line the Greenamics team had ever seen for gluten! See ya later bread…

Get your Nutrismart home testing kit from Greenamics: email them or visit them at their Central office. Visit their website for more information and to find out about their other services (they also do Trace Elements hair testing).

Disclaimer: It’s worth noting that not everyone is onboard with IgG testing. Certain members of the medical community restrict the idea of food intolerances to allergy testing, aka IgE. They contend that the existence of IgG antibodies is controversial and remain unconvinced that IgG presence means causation. Some believe it indicates correlation instead so the tests could be showing false positives, pointing to the fact that these antibodies can be found in both tolerant and intolerant people. There are no easy answers and the truth is, the medical community is still figuring things out when it comes to food intolerances/sensitivities and IgG- they simply don’t have all the facts yet.