Mark Pottage

“Back to feeling normal again, without fear of how tomorrow will be after consuming certain foods”

42-year-old IT Consultant, Mark Pottage, was dealing with a range of unpleasant symptoms including IBS, bloating, fatigue and occasional diarrhoea. Mark’s symptoms had been ongoing for 18 months and getting progressively worse.

When asked about how these symptoms affected his life, Mark said: “Generally feeling uncomfortable. It’s not a nice feeling needing to be by a toilet for hours the following day after eating something that doesn’t agree with your body. I was unable to carry out activities the following day ”

After seeing a GP and multiple attempts at keeping a food diary to try and document the food and drinks he’d been consuming, Mark decided to try YorkTest after being recommended by a friend.

That’s when he ordered the Premium Food Intolerance Test, with his results indicating that his body was reacting to cow’s milk, and eggs. This surprised Mark as he’d always consumed a lot of milk and eggs in his daily diet from a young age.

When we asked Mark how he felt after removing these trigger foods, he said “Within 2-3 weeks I was already feeling better, moving to alternative sources for these items.”

Our test analyses your IgG reactions to 200 food and drinks – from common ingredients like gluten and cow’s milk, to health superfoods like kale and quinoa.

The process involves sending a finger-prick blood sample back to YorkTest. Mark then received his results within 7-days through the Wellness Hub, in an easy-to-read traffic light-based format.

Eliminating the trigger foods and sticking to his diet plan has helped clear Mark’s symptoms and enabled him to resume his normal life. On his experience of embarking on the elimination process, Mark commented: “Removing cow’s milk and supplementing for Alpro alternative was really easy; it was avoiding products that contained milk that was harder. Removing eggs was a challenge as this was in a vast amount of products. The Tesco ‘free from’ and other supermarket equivalents really helped though.”

When asked how he found the nutritional consultation Mark said, “The nutritional consultation was really informative albeit it was over quickly (30 minutes flies by)”. Similarly, Mark found the Customer Service Team “very helpful and never had a problem. Always willing to help and provide advice. It’s a lot to take in and I had so many questions off the back of the information I was given. It takes time to understand the technical terms and read around the area of food to really understand its impact on your own body”

When asked how life had changed since taking the test and how he would summarise his experience,  Mark concluded: “Back to feeling normal again, without fear of how tomorrow will be after consuming certain foods.”