Recent Developments in Food Characterization and Adulteration Detection:  Technique-Oriented Perspectives

Abstract

This review covers mainly publications that appeared in Analytical Abstracts (Royal Society of Chemistry) from January 1990 to February 2001. The number of publications on this topic continues to grow, and during the past three years (1998-2000) about 150 reviews and/or overviews have been published in the area of food. Numerous techniques and food matrices or chemical components are presented and discussed in these reviews. The present review is intentionally limited to eight techniques or classes of techniques and intends to be a "technique by technique" presentation of "what was used" or "what is used" to characterize food products and to detect their possible adulteration. The present review focuses on the following techniques: microscopic analysis; HPLC; GC, GC-(MS, FTIR); UV-visible spectrophotometry; AAS/AES, ICP-(AES, MS); IRMS, GC-IRMS, GC-C-IRMS; DSC; IR, mid-IR, and NMR (202 references). Emphasis is placed as much as possible on chemometrical treatment of analytical data, which are commonly used to achieve the final objective, either food characterization or adulteration detection. Finally, a brief description is given of the new generation of analytical systems that combine powerful analytical techniques and powerful computer software for a best extraction of the information from analytical data.

Analysis of adulteration in honey with standard sugar solutions and syrups using attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and multivariate methods

“…Email: marlonrl@yahoo.com.mx (PCA) allows to classify unknown samples into groups on the basis of similarities (Cordella, Martel, Sbirrazzuoli, & Lizzani, 2002). The technique highlights the maximum variations in a set of apparently similar spectra and reduces the representation of spectral data to a small set of well-defined factors or components representing the major variations common to all spectra in the set (Sivakesava & Irudayaraj, 2001c).…”

Preliminary Investigation on Variety, Brewery and Vintage of Wines using Three-dimensional Fluorescence Spectroscopy

“…Adulteration of foods is possible, which may bring an unfair competition in the wine industry and may harm the rights of consumers. Thus, there is a significant interest in accurate methods for wine characterization that could be used to prevent adulteration and also to classify wine from different geographical origins or countries (Liu et al, 2008;Cordella et al, 2002;Fischer et al, 1999;Reid et al, 2006).…”

Reconhecimento de padrões por métodos não supervisionados: explorando procedimentos quimiométricos para tratamento de dados analíticos

“…O uso da composição química para verificar a similaridade entre amostras empregando métodos de reconhecimento de padrões é amplamente explorado, com a finalidade de garantir a autenticidade de produtos agroindustriais [8][9][10][11] . Os trabalhos pioneiros envolvendo o reconhecimento de padrões foram propostos no final da década de 70 12,13 .…”

“…A autenticação de alimentos é um nicho de pesquisa estabelecido, que busca desenvolver procedimentos para controlar e assegu-rar a qualidade dos produtos agroindustriais, a partir das informações sobre composição química [8][9][10][11][12][13] . Recentemente, as questões relacionadas com a autenticação de alimentos têm despertado grande interesse devido aos problemas de adulteração, contaminação e utilização indevida de organismos geneticamente modificados.…”