(Bio)technological Approaches for Reducing Allergenicity of Food Ingredients

Food allergies represent a growing phenomena worldwide, with health implications on the allergic population. Food allergy needs appropriate risk management schemes to reduce the risk for sensitive individuals. In the recent years, innovative processing methods have been explored and applied to allergenic food ingredients in order to investigate on the potential decrease of the allergenic potential and some advances have been made with this aim. In perspective some of the described technologies might be exploited by food industries to produce hypoallergenic or non-allergenic food products to be tolerated by allergic consumers. Grounding on this, the present book chapter aims to provide a general overview about traditional and most innovative processing methods applied to foods to obtain products with a decrease or negligible allergenic potential.