Edible insects as ingredients in food products: nutrition, functional properties, allergenicity of insect proteins, and processing modifications

Abstract

Edible insect products contain high-quality protein and other nutrients, including minerals and fatty acids. The consumption of insect food products is considered a future trend and a potential strategy that could greatly contribute to meeting food needs worldwide. However, insect proteins have the potential to be allergenic to insect consumers. In this review, the nutritional value and allergy risk of insect-derived foods, and the immune responses elicited by insect allergens are summarized and discussed. Tropomyosin and arginine kinase are the most important and widely known insect allergens, which induce Th2-biased immune responses and reduced the activity of CD4⁺T regulatory cells. Besides, food processing methods have been effectively improving the nutrients and characteristics of insect products. However, limited reviews systematically address the immune reactions to allergens present in edible insect proteins following treatment with food processing technologies. The conventional/novel food processing techniques and recent advances in reducing the allergenicity of insect proteins are discussed in this review, focusing on the structural changes of allergens and immune regulation.

Keywords:

• Edible insects
• food allergy
• food processing
• IgE-binding ability
• immune response

Author contributions

Jing Yang: Supervision, Resources, Writing-review & editing; Shuling Zhou: Writing-original draft; Hong Kuang: Writing-original draft; Chunhong Tang: Writing-original draft; Jiajia Song: Supervision, Resources, Writing-review & editing. All authors wrote the manuscript and approved its final version.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing (Grant No. cstc2021jcyj-msxmX0712; cstc2021jcyj-msxmX0772), Science and Technology Research Program of Chongqing Municipal Education Commission (Grant No. KJQN202100802), Chongqing Technology Foresight and System Innovation Project (Grant No. CSTB2022TFII-OFX0016), Curriculum Ideology and Politics of Postgraduate in Chongqing Technology and Business University (Grant No. 2021YSZ0307).