Food Allergy Profile (15 Foods)

Food reactions are confusing on your own. A meal leaves you itchy or swollen, and you are left guessing which of a dozen ingredients was the culprit. This panel turns that guesswork into a starting map.

It checks your blood for the allergy antibodies your body makes against fifteen of the foods most likely to cause immediate reactions. Read alongside your own history, it points you and an allergist toward the foods worth investigating and away from the ones that are probably fine.

What This Panel Reveals

Your immune system can make a special antibody (called immunoglobulin E, or IgE) against proteins in food. When that antibody is present, you are what doctors call sensitized. Sensitized is not the same as allergic. Many people carry these antibodies to foods they eat happily every day. This panel maps where sensitization exists across four food families at once.

The first group is nuts and the legume peanut. These are the foods where blood testing tends to be most informative, and where a positive result carries the most weight. The second group is the childhood classics, cow's milk and egg white, which drive most early-life food allergy.

The third group is seafood, split into fish (codfish, salmon, tuna) and shellfish (shrimp, scallop). These foods share proteins within each group, so results often move together. The fourth group is the plant staples sesame, soybean, and wheat, where a positive antibody is common but less reliably tied to real allergy.

Seeing all four groups together is the point. A single positive can look alarming in isolation. Across the full panel, you can see whether your reactivity is narrow and focused on one food, or broad across many, which usually means shared, cross-reacting proteins rather than fifteen separate allergies.

How to Read Your Results Together

A positive result is a clue, not a verdict. Its meaning depends almost entirely on whether you have actually reacted to that food. The patterns below are where reading the whole panel at once pays off.

Two biology facts explain most of these patterns. Tree nuts share proteins, so walnut and pecan track closely, as do cashew and pistachio. Shellfish share a muscle protein called tropomyosin, and bony fish share one called parvalbumin, which is why fish results and shellfish results tend to cluster. A cluster of positives is often one underlying sensitivity showing up many times, not many independent allergies.

What to Do with Your Results

Start with the foods you have actually eaten. If a food you clearly reacted to comes back positive, that pairing deserves an allergist visit and likely an action plan. If a food you eat often comes back positive but has never bothered you, that is usually harmless sensitization, and stopping the food can do more harm than good.

For the nut and legume results, a follow-up class of tests can sharpen the picture. These measure antibodies to the single most telling protein in a food, such as Ara h 2 in peanut, Cor a 14 in hazelnut, and Ana o 3 in cashew. In a systematic review of 149 studies covering 24,489 people, these protein-level tests were highly specific: among people who are not truly allergic, about 92 out of 100 test negative for peanut, 95 for hazelnut, and 94 for cashew. High specificity means a positive is less likely to be a false alarm, though it still has to fit your history to confirm a real allergy.

The one result no blood test can settle is whether you will truly react. When your history and your blood results disagree, the reference standard is a supervised feeding test done with an allergist, where the food is eaten in gradually increasing amounts under medical watch. That is the step that separates a lab positive from a real allergy.

If you are tracking a known childhood allergy over time, the direction of change matters more than any single number. Antibody levels to milk, egg, wheat, and soy often fall as these allergies resolve, while nut, fish, and shellfish allergies more often persist. Retesting roughly once a year in a growing child is reasonable, because a steady decline can signal it is time to discuss a supervised re-challenge.

When Results Can Be Misleading

A few things distort the whole panel at once. If your overall IgE antibody level is high, as it often is with eczema or hay fever, you can rack up multiple positives that mean little. This is the core weakness of broad testing: sensitization is far more common than real allergy, so scanning many foods you never suspected tends to produce positives you then wrongly avoid.

This is why untargeted screening is discouraged. Blood tests for wheat and soy are the least reliable in this panel; in pooled analysis their specificity is low, roughly 43 percent for wheat and 38 percent for soy, meaning that among people who are not allergic fewer than half test negative, so a large share of positives do not reflect true allergy.