Food Allergy Detective App Offers Clues

Diagnosing food allergies requires some detective work. Anyone who thinks they have food allergies or food sensitivities should certainly consult a doctor, however there is some work you can do before and after seeing the doctor. While skin and blood tests may provide some clues, keeping track of what you eat and how you feel after you eat provides valuable evidence.

Fortunately, there's an app for that. Enter Tim, a good husband who wanted to help his wife as she struggled to figure out her food allergies and sensitivities. He created the Food Allergy Detective App, which can be used on an iPhone, iPod Touch or an iPad. Tim asked me to try it out to see if my blog readers might be interested in this tool.

We're currently doing some of our own detective work with my child's allergies. We've got an Excel® spreadsheet with a list of foods and we're recording any symptoms. The paper is getting pretty messy with our arrows, highlights and scribbles. I decided to enter it into Food Allergy Detective App through my iPad.

Here's what I like about this app. The eight top allergens are already listed, but it was very easy for me to go in and add categories I specifically needed like, "almonds" and "baked milk". From there, I could drill down further and document "1 baked egg in 24 cookies". This precision is important to me as we investigate my child's reactions to specific foods.

The app then allows you to record any symptoms that occurred after ingesting the food. Everything from abdominal pain to hives is already listed. Additional symptoms can be added. Now, the cool part is the app actually analyzes the data and lets you know if any patterns emerge.
Very convenient.

My sloppy charts work fine, but this app is much neater and has the added feature of organizing the data into patterns. If you are struggling with physical symptoms that seem to be related to the foods you eat, the Food Allergy Detective app may be just the tool to help you figure out the foods causing your symptoms.

For more information, check out Food Allergy Detective.