What If Your Hair Knew What Was Making You Feel Terrible?

Written by Kelsey Kashluba

Meet Lucy, the founder of gutChek, who spent years eating “healthy” and feeling inexplicably awful - until a strand of hair changed everything. Now she’s on a mission to help you (and honestly, your dog too) finally figure out what’s going on.

Lucy is the kind of person who has figured something out and cannot, in good conscience, keep it to herself. She’s warm, she’s practical, she’ll tell you exactly what to do and why, and she will absolutely admit that she still eats eggs benny on Christmas even though she knows better. She takes a digestive enzyme and she moves on. She is not here to be perfect. She is here to make you feel good.

The thing she’s figured out? Your body has opinions about what you’re feeding it. Strong ones. And it has been trying to tell you - through the bloating, the brain fog, the “why am I so tired after I just ate”, for probably longer than you’d like to admit.

For Lucy, it was eggs. She loved them. They did not love her back. Every time she ate them, the energy just… left. Gone. It wasn’t until she was running a Functional Medicine clinic and offering food sensitivity testing to her patients that she finally connected the dots on her own diet -  and watched those same dots connect for hundreds of other people too.

“It’s so amazing when you eat foods that you can actually digest,” she says, laughing. “You feel great. What a concept!”

From Clinic to Kitchen Table

Here’s the problem with food sensitivity testing: it works, and it’s expensive. IgG blood testing starts around $350. Which means most people file it under “maybe someday” and go back to wondering why they feel like garbage after lunch.

Lucy wanted to fix that. So when a client mentioned that hair testing.. yes, hair, like the kind used in drug and alcohol testing, could work for food intolerances too, she paid attention. She was skeptical. She ran the split tests anyway. The results were more accurate, more consistent, and dramatically cheaper than blood testing.

That was eleven years ago. gutChek was born, and Lucy has not looked back.

The Science (Don’t Worry, It’s Painless)

You send in a small sample of hair. gutChek analyzes it for food intolerances - which, importantly, are not the same as allergies. Allergies are the immune system going full alarm bells. Intolerances are quieter. Sneakier. They’re the reason you can eat the same thing every single day for sixty years and never once connect it to the fact that something is very, very off.

Case in point: one of Lucy’s clients. Scottish. Sixty years old. Eaten oatmeal for breakfast his entire life. His results came back with oats as a high intolerance. He did not believe this. His wife made him try the elimination diet anyway - because wives are often right..and ten days later he called Lucy, genuinely baffled, to report that he had been sleeping through the night.

For the first time in his life.

He added the oats back in. He was up in the night again. The oats had been causing inflammation in his bladder for decades and nobody  - not him, not his doctors - had ever made the connection.

“As much as he likes oatmeal,” Lucy says, “he likes sleeping through the night even more.”

Yes, There’s One for Your Dog (and Your Horse)

Of course there is. Working with her favourite vet to calibrate the testing for animals felt completely natural to Lucy - because if food affects us, why wouldn’t it affect them? The petChek results have been some of the most dramatic she’s seen: hot spots gone, chronic diarrhea resolved, competition horses healthier and performing better. “Pets and horses are the most fun,” she says, “because we get the strongest results.”

The reason, she thinks, is simple: once you know something makes your pet unwell, you just… don’t give it to them anymore. No negotiating. No “just this once.” People, on the other hand, are considerably more complicated about it.

One client tested her dog, got such good results that she ordered a kit for herself, and then called Lucy to admit she was struggling to actually change what she was eating. Lucy’s response: “Would you feed your dog the food that used to make her sick?”

The client said something that “I won’t put in print,” Lucy tells me, still laughing about it. But she also said it was the analogy that finally made it click - and that she’d be making better choices for herself going forward.

The Bottom Line

Send hair. Get results. Remove the culprits for three weeks. See how you feel. That’s it. Changes can start showing up in as little as 48 hours. Inflammation takes up to three weeks to calm down. And you might, like Lucy, finally understand why eggs benny have been quietly ruining your afternoon for years.

“Food should make us feel good and give us energy,” Lucy says. “Not make us feel tired, or bloated, or send us running to the bathroom right after a meal.”

She’s right. And she has eleven years of sleeping-through-the-night stories to prove it.

Get your food intolerance test here.