Reducing food allergy: is there promise for food applications?

Food allergy is on the rise and has become a growing food safety concern. The main treatment is strictly avoiding allergens in the diet. However, this is difficult to do because foods are sometimes contaminated with allergens due to processing of different foods with the same machinery. For this reason, accidental ingestion of trace amount of allergenic proteins is common. For children with severe food allergy, this could be life-threatening. Food products with reduced allergenic proteins, if developed, could be beneficial and may raise the threshold of the amount of allergenic proteins required to trigger an allergic reaction. As a result, the number of serious allergic reactions may decrease. Moreover, such less allergenic products may be useful or replace regular products in studies such as oral tolerance induction or early exposure experiments, where children with severe peanut allergy are usually excluded due to their severe intolerance. This review focuses on recent findings and progress made in approaches to reduce allergenic proteins in foods. Modifying methods may include physical and chemical treatments as well as lifestyle changes and the use of supplements. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks these methods present for production of hypoallergenic food products and food allergy prevention.