Strategies to reduce or prevent wheat coeliac- immunogenicity and wheat sensitivity through food

Cereals are among the oldest foods of humans. Wheat is one of these. In present times, several syndromes are, whether true or false, increasingly attributed to the consumption of wheat, with increasing costs for medical care and decreasing turnover for the food industry, especially the bakery sector. Many western societies show remarkable annual increases in their health care costs, often surmounting their economic growth rates. Governmental health policies should urgently revert towards the stimulation of disease prevention practices instead of maintaining the stimulation of expensive medical care.
Here we review and discuss possible strategies to prevent or reduce the incidence of wheat-related conditions through application of breeding and food-related
technologies. Breeding includes selection and crossing for low-immunogenic wheat varieties using varieties, accessions, and wild relatives, silencing the expression of gluten genes, and advanced genome editing techniques to eliminate gluten genes, such as CRISPR/Cas9 technology. Food-related approaches include the reduced application of vital gluten, exclusion of gliadin from isolated gluten by separation, increased use of sourdough fermentation and malting, utilisation of patient-specific gluten epitopesensitivity profiles, introduction of the gluten contamination elimination diet (GCED) especially in individuals that are non-responsive to the gluten-free diet, to acquire more fundamental knowledge on immune modulating factors, and the design of an
intervention study to learn about the medical and mental motives of people to switch towards a ‘gluten-free’ diet. Finally, we discuss the development, testing and promoting of efficient disease prevention measures within the societal context.