Plasma processing of cashew nuts and its effect on composition and allergens

Among healthy foods, cashew (Anacardium occidentale, L.) nut is considered an important constituent in person’s diet, and they present pleasant taste and flavor. The processing by plasma irradiation is an emergent technology for food treatment, especially for temperature sensitive product, which has shown no significant negative effect on foods composition. The sim of this work was to evaluate the effect of plasma processing, using a CCRD, on cashew nut composition and allergenicity. Groups of samples containing five constituents were created in triplicate to test different plasma processing. The groups of nuts were randomly processed by low-pressure plasma, using glow discharge plasma. Anacardic acids and allergens were quantified by HPLC and SDS-PAGE, respectively. Additionally, the overall composition was evaluated by 1H NMR. The application of plasma presented a significant effect on cashew nuts composition, independent of the duration or flow rate of processing. It was detected increases in amounts of anacardic acids (15:1, 15:2, and 15:3), fatty acids (oleic, linoleic, palmitic and stearic) after all process conditions, with 70.92% of total variance captured using 2 LVs. On the other hand, the amount of sucrose decreased after all the processing, from 33 to 18 mg.g-1 of nut. The total amount of anacardic acids increased from 0.7 to 1.2ug.mg-1 of nut. The major change was observed for anacardic acid (C15:3) with an increase from 0.2 to 0.55 µg/mg of nut for the samples treated with a flow of 10 mL.min-1 and 30 min of processing. Among the treatments, 10 min of plasma processing at flow rate of 30 mL.min-1 of synthetic air followed by 20 min at flow rate 5.8 mL.min-1 presented less effect on nuts composition as a whole. Plasma processing of cashew nuts did not affect binding of either the rabbit anti-cashew or human cashew allergic IgE binding.