“A healthy diet for a healthy life”: Food processing and additives are needed to improve food safety, freshness, taste, texture, or appearance. However, before they can be used, food processing techniques and additives must be checked for potential harmful effects on human health. The Joint Initiative FOOD_HYPERSENS addresses the adverse and beneficial effects of food ingredients and food processing on hypersensitivities to food.

In particular, the call aims to understand:

• the mechanisms responsible for inducing or preventing food intolerances and food allergies, both in children and adults (e.g., immunity, inflammation, nutrient metabolism, genetics, microbiota, physiology);

• how food processing and food ingredients can modulate the occurrence of food allergies/intolerances;

• the development of new approaches to food processing (e.g., novel food ingredients, novel processing methods) to decrease food intolerance/food allergy;

• the development and/or validation of diagnostics/methods to distinguish between actual and perceived food intolerances and allergies (IgE and non-IgE-mediated);

• the development and/or validation of detection methods for adverse or beneficial food components generated through food processing.

The main application for microfluidics in this call is the analysis of food additives. This can be done on models of the human digestive tract, immune system, or microbiome.