Applications of Mass Spectrometry to the Analysis of Adulterated Food

Abstract

Food quality and safety are the major issues in food industry around the world. With the abundance of processed food with long supply chain in the market, food fraud is always a concern. Food fraud is defined as modification of an actual labeling of food chemicals in which expensive, less accessible original ingredients are replaced by lower cost and more accessible alternatives, which is also known as food adulteration. Some of these food adulterations might only affect the public mass financially, but some adulteration might affect others more seriously. Various food authentication techniques can be utilized to ensure safety and quality of food products adhering to the standards, such as DNA-based techniques with polymerase chain reaction, vibrational spec- troscopy, electronic nose, and mass spectrophotometry, which has been used widely to estimate pharmaceutical and biological samples. However, most of these techniques still require substantial sample preparation or some have very high sensitivity to adulterants and are prone to give undefined results. Complex mixtures of food adulterants can be identified using very high resolution mass spectroscopy. The chemical compounds and structure of natural and mixtures of the adulterants are examined in this chapter using advanced mass spectroscopy technique and gas chromatography time-of-flight mass spectroscopy to identify the lard biomarker. Keywords: