Immunomodulation by food

Abstract

An optimally active and balanced immune system is a pre-requisite for maintaining health. Immunity strongly varies in different life stages. This chapter describes the putative role that foods can play in achieving proper immune functioning. Different food components can exert effects on specific immune compartments. This offers potential for use in a variety of applications, depending on the characteristics of deviating metabolic processes and consumers or patients. It becomes more and more clear that the etiology of a given disease varies from person to person. Thus, also treatments, or supporting dietary measures, should be tuned more towards individual needs. This means that in the functional foods arena more knowledge is required of individual consumers’ responses, and the deviations in metabolism that underlie the development of chronic anomalies. Therefore, functional foods should be regarded as food products with specific health benefits for specific groups of consumers. An overview is given of the current research published on immunomodulation by food type, with a focus on allergies, in relation to probiotics, beta-glucans, and fungal immunomodulatory proteins (FIPs). We conclude that immunomodulation via the diet has its merits in, at the least, specific immune-related anomalies such as allergies. It may well be that there is also potential in other application areas such as maintaining immune homeostasis.