High heat and pressure render peanuts less allergenic
Peanut allergies are a serious health threat, and consuming even a trace amount has the potential to cause a life-threatening reaction. In the past 20 years, peanut allergies have tripled in the United States, said Soheila Maleki, a chemist with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS). ARS scientists are researching solutions to prevent or treat peanut allergies and methods to create a safer peanut through food processing and crossbreeding cultivars with naturally lower levels of allergens to develop a hypoallergenic peanut plant.
At the ARS Southern Regional Research Center in New Orleans, LA, a team of ARS researchers, including Maleki, has been involved in ongoing research to develop immunotherapeutic tools for the treatment of peanut and tree nut allergies, improve diagnostics of peanut and tree nut allergies, and understand the mechanisms of cross-reactivity of peanut-allergic individuals with tree nuts.
The research team has looked at what happens to peanuts following different processes—boiling, frying, and roasting. Maleki and colleagues in Spain showed that cooking peanuts under high heat and pressure could reduce allergenic potential, whereas roasting raw peanuts causes them to undergo molecular changes that increase allergenicity. This groundbreaking research showed that food processing methods can also affect the detection of allergens in food.
