Selenium concentrations were determined via hydride generation atomic absorption spectrometry in more than 100 convenience and fast foods including 34 vegetarian dishes. The foods were purchased mainly in Ayrshire, Scotland but some came from other parts of the UK. The results indicate a considerable amount of selenium in certain mushrooms, spinach, fish, offals and chicken-based products. The selenium content of beef- and pork-based products was generally somewhat lower. Vegetarians having a sufficient intake of mushrooms (in particular button and closed cap mushrooms) and spinach do not seem to be at risk of selenium deficiency provided of course that the selenium in mushrooms, in particular, is bioavailable.
The overall evaluation of foodstuffs and its result: the numerical description of food quality, play an increasingly important role in scientijc food research, in product development and in the field of quality control in food manufacture. In view of the commonly adopted determination of food quality, the computation of the overall quality index is based on the transformation of parameters of the chosen product attributes into dimensionless values between 0 and 1 (normalization) and on their weighted summation. The total value of the weighting factors amount to 1 in every case with 0 representing the worst and 1 the best food quality. Within the framework of the adaptation a continued development of the overall quality index, different statistical methods and the pattern recognition can be readily used.
An often discussed problem of the sensory evaluation of food with the scoring method concerns the determination of weighting factors. In our investigations of some bakery products we compared different scoring results having got by skilled panel members with classification data of the same panel members and about 30 consumers. Using some mathematical methods (e. g. cluster analysis, non-linear discriminance analysis, linear regression equations) the relations between the scoring and classification data were analysed. With the same mathematical program the classification limits were determined. As total weighted scores they are nearly independent of the weighting factors' quantity at the investigated bakery products. With the mathematical methods we got higher weighting factors for "form" and "smell" and smaller for "taste" and "crumb" of white bread in face of the traditional weighting factors. The developed and tested computer program can be used for every food product if the necessary conditions are observed and sufficient data in hand.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.