Physical and Microbial Discrimination Between Food Grade Sodium Chloride and El-Sayahaat Salt.

Abstract

The problem at hand is dealing with the possibility of discrimination between El-sayahaat salt and other edible food grade sodium chloride sources. Such trend was considered due to the harmful effect of El-sayahaat salt which related to the presence of higher concentration of heavy metals. To achieve such goal, instrumental analysis based on X-ray fluorescence, X-ray diffraction and Infrared technique were considered in order to realize and identify the heavy metals as well as the functional groups of the investigated samples. The obtained data were statistically analyzed according to the principal component methods by which El-sayahaat salt was successfully discriminated in relation to the other NaCl sources. It was also found that cadmium (Cd) was only identified in El-sayahaat salt (2.3ppm) accompanied with high concentration of lead (Pb, 20ppm), Iron (Fe, 13ppm) and mercury (Hg) that reached 1.0 ppm represents ten times that of the non-private sector (NPS). With respect to the IR spectra the most pronounced functional group that could act as a finger print of Elsayahaat salt was identified at wave number 1540.84 cm-¹ of 32.2% related to the covalent sulfate. On the other hand El-sayahaat salt sample was found to be microbially contaminated; while the other four investigated NaCl salt sources were considered to be safe from any microbial contamination.