La gestione del rischio allergologico nella legislazione comunitaria in materia di etichettatura alimentare

Abstract

FAO and WHO pay particularly attention to food allergies. For this purpose, they designated the Codex Alimentarius Commission to list ingredients that trigger the most frequent and severe allergic reactions, and they must be labeled on food. In Europe, the main food allergens are more numerous than those considered by Codex Alimentarius and so, the EU increased the list of allergens that must be labeled. We described the presence of allergens in some Italian fermented beverages without an adequate labeling, and we described the possible reasons for the non-compliance to the regulations in this matter: the translation of the complex legal phraseology into the different languages of the EU, in conjunction with the lack of specific technological expertise of translators, produced a text that could be misunderstood. For this reason, it seems important to provide in Italian an excursus on the succession of regulations regarding the food allergenic risk, underlining the possible reasons of the misinterpretation of the actual one