Terahertz Spectroscopic Analysis of Lactose in Infant Formula: Implications for Detection and Quantification

Abstract

Lactose plays a significant role in daily lives as a constituent of various food and pharmaceutical products. Yet, lactose intolerance conditions demand low-lactose and lactose-free products in the market. These increasing nutritional claims and labels on food products entail simple and reliable methods of analysis that can be used for meeting quality standards, nutritional claims and legal requirements. In this study, terahertz time–domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) was employed to analyse α-lactose monohydrate qualitatively and quantitatively in food products. Both absorption spectra and absorption coefficient spectra were investigated for their prediction performance. Regression models for lactose quantification using peak area and height of the absorption peaks 0.53 and 1.37 THz were developed and assessed in infant formula samples. Satisfactory prediction results were achieved in ideal conditions with pure standards, but not in all predictions of infant formula samples. Reasons and further implications are discussed.

Chemometric Analysis of a Ternary Mixture of Caffeine, Quinic Acid, and Nicotinic Acid by Terahertz Spectroscopy

“…In addition, THz waves are resistant to strong scattering and fluorescent substances in samples, which are issues arising in infrared and Raman spectroscopy, respectively. THz-TDS has been used with chemometric methods, from simple linear regression , to machine learning models, − to quantify nutritional, pharmaceutical, and explosive compounds. Applications of THz-TDS and chemometric methods in food analysis are summarized in Table .…”