Save your £139 — genuinely. I've been down the "just tell me what's wrong" road myself (I'm on a very restricted diet for a gut that barely moves), so the pull of a test that promises a tidy list of culprits is completely understandable. But the York Test and the other IgG "food intolerance" kits measure IgG antibodies, which are really just a marker of the foods you eat, not the foods that harm you — so healthy eaters routinely come back "intolerant" to the things they eat most. The British Dietetic Association and Allergy UK both advise against them. And the real harm isn't the money, it's that they nearly always hand you a long avoid-list, so you end up cutting foods you never needed to — the exact opposite of what a bloated, fed-up gut needs.
What I'd do with that money-and-a-bit-of-patience instead:
• If gluten's on your radar, get the coeliac blood test through your GP first — and keep eating gluten until it's done. This is the one that catches people out: going gluten-free before the test makes it come back falsely negative, and then you can never quite be sure. It's free, it's validated, and it's the one thing genuinely worth ruling out properly.
• Keep a simple food-and-symptom diary for two or three weeks — food, time, symptom, time. Non-immediate gut reactions can lag by a day or more, so patterns are far easier to spot written down than held in your head. That diary is also gold if you get a dietitian referral.
• If you do want to test foods, do it as a structured elimination rather than a scattergun cull. Low-FODMAP is the evidence-based one for IBS, but it's meant to be a 2–6 week test followed by careful reintroduction — not a forever diet — and it's much safer and more useful done with a FODMAP-trained dietitian (the BDA keeps a freelance directory if the NHS wait is long).
• Don't discount the perimenopause bit. Shifting hormones genuinely affect gut motility and bloating for a lot of women, and that can come and go on its own — worth flagging to your GP so it isn't all pinned on food.