Genetic Testing - can it tell you your allergies?

Ritesh Bawri

Dec 26, 2023 — 2 min read

Allergies are very common in our modern world. There was a time when we had allergies to peanuts or even aspirin. Today, people suffer from allergies to wheat, gluten, milk, soy, and even tomatoes.

So any test that tells you what you are allergic to would be extremely alluring.

Into this fray jumped in genetic testing as a way to tell you if you were allergic to a particular food type. It sounded scientific enough. A test would determine your gene pool and then identify the specific foods that you were allergic to.

If the test showed that you were allergic to tomatoes, onions, garlic, or leeks, then regardless of whether you were or not, you should believe that you were.

After all, the test did tell you that you were, didn't it?

You could protest that you have been eating tomatoes all your life with no side effects, but your protestations would be brushed aside.You just were not able to understand the impact it was having on you.

The humble tomato has wished all the ills upon you. The test now conclusively proves it. So who are you to argue?

So why do you not feel the connection?

So here is the thing. For anyone to determine that your unique genetic type has any correlation to tomatoes, they would have to build a model.

The model would have to determine that people with your genetic type have been shown to be allergic in the past.

For this, at some point, a test would have been conducted to determine that people with a gene type showed allergies to a certain food type.

Remember, we are not talking about a cuisine. We are talking about a specific ingredient: tomato.

If you know anything about farming, you know there are dozens of types of tomatoes. All grown with different methods. Fed to a cohort of test people with lifestyles that cannot possibly be compared to each other, leave alone you.

So it is extremely hard to compare a random sample of tomatoes fed to a random pool of people with you.

But hey, we want to believe we have solved the problem, don't we?

NB: There are people who suffer from very serious allergies. An allergy from dispirin can cause internal bleeding and death. So it is not my intention to mock allergies or your desire to find out things you are allergic to. It is my hope that I help you find scientific methods of doing so.

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