Foodborne bacterial infections and diseases have been considered to be a major threat for public health in the worldwide. Increased incidence of human diseases caused by foodborne pathogens have been correlated with growing world population and mobility. Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) has been regarded as an innovative gene amplification technology and emerged as an alternative to PCR-based methodologies in both clinical laboratory and food safety testing. Nowadays, LAMP has been applied to detection and identification on pathogens from microbial diseases, as it showed significant advantage in high sensitivity, specificity and rapidity. The high sensitivity of LAMP enables detection of the pathogens in sample materials even without time consuming sample preparation. An overview of LAMP mainly containing the development history, reaction principle and its application to four kind of foodborne pathogens detection are presented in this paper. As concluded, with the advantages of rapidity, simplicity, sensitivity, specificity and robustness, LAMP is capable of applications for clinical diagnosis as well as surveillance of infection diseases. Moreover, the main purpose of this paper is to provide theoretical basis for the clinical application of LAMP technology. •The background of LAMP is introduced in detail, including the development history, principle of LAMP amplification, et al.•It is important to describe the current research of LAMP in the file of foodborne pathogens causing infection and disease.•The current research of LAMP is presented, LAMP combined with other biological ways to solve the limitations of it as well.