Food
Allergies & atopic diseases

Food allergy is one the of the most common chronic diseases of childhood, especially if persistent, impacting growth and nutrition, quality of life, and may even be life threatening due to the risk of anaphylaxis. Cow’s milk allergy (CMA) is one of the most common types of food allergy in industrialised countries (Flom and Sicherer 2019).

Dietary management of CMA consists of 2 approaches, one is “passive” approach, consisting of elimination diet, the other one is “proactive” approach, meaning actively modulate the immune system. Gut microbiota dysbiosis induces altered gut function, which results in aberrant immune response towards allergic pathways instead of protective tolerogenic pathways (Plunkett and Nagler 2017).

Furthermore, the gut immune system, the so-called gut-associated lymphoid tissue (GALT), has 70 – 80% of the immune cells of the body (Castro and Arntzen, 1993), which make it the largest ‘immune organ” of the body. Targeting gut microbiota by using nutritional factors to actively immunomodulate the immune system opens therefore exciting research potential.

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