Food Allergen Thresholds
Bio-Check attended the 8th Workshop on Food Allergen Methodologies this month in Vancouver, Canada. The conference discussed the international approaches to allergen thresholds protecting the health of consumers following avoidance diets for medical reasons. In the case of gluten, there has been a consensus to apply a safe threshold of 20ppm gluten to gluten-free products but not for other allergens. The analytical tools (onsite, screening, confirmatory) needed as prerequisites to support such a method based approach expose many challenges. The lack of Reference Materials needed to evaluate and validate methods is fundamental to the enforcement of safe limits. The complexity and diversity of food composition means that ‘one- size-fits-all’ approaches to analysis are unrealistic; not only are a diversity of analytical approaches required but new ones as well. For example, highly processed and fermented foods attracted attention as one category of foods where current gluten detection methods have limitations: by detecting a specific target they are unable to detect other relevant peptide fragments. The work on thresholds is being driven through research organisation such as FARRP, TNO, ILSI and industry groups such as VITAL. In many cases, they are working collaboratively, which will increase the prospect for harmonisation of thresholds. Using the most robust scientific data they are establishing references doses for each allergen for which action levels can be set. The reference doses are considered conservative, protecting all but the most sensitive individuals. They are also a reminder that, when assessing the risk of food allergens, as well as their prevalence and severity, their potency needs to be considered as well.