Innovative and Emerging Technologies in the Detection of Food Adulterants

Introduction

Food Adulteration

Though the concept of safe food is widespread today, food adulteration is also increasing exponentially to meet the needs of the rapidly increasing population and consequent urbanization demands. Due to this, it can have a global impact with far-reaching and sometimes lethal consequences. Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), defines adulteration of food as "The addition or subtraction of any substance to or from food so that the natural composition and quality of food substance is affected." During food adulteration, a minimum quantity of non-nutritious substances are added intentionally to improve the appearance, texture, and storage properties of the food. For example, to make the profit, food items are adulterated with toxic substances, like metanil yellow which is a nonpermitted artificial color used to intensify the tinge of turmeric powder, chalk and brick powder in chili powder, etc. The effects on health include anemia, paralysis, brain injury, stomach disorder and cancer (Pardeshi, 2019). Other examples include blending of mustard oil with argemone oil which was started in 1998 and combining imported milk and infant formula with melamine in 2008 (Pathan and Pawara, 2017). The adulteration of food is quite common in developing countries in order to meet the increasing demands for food. At present, the most commonly adulterated food product is milk. The World Health Organization (WHO) described the international milk crisis in China (2008) as "one of the largest food safety events that the UN health agency has had to address within the last few years." Adulteration of milk with melamine was the reason for this crisis. Melamine is a nitrogen-rich organic base added to plastics during manufacturing. This is added to food products, especially milk, to show spurious results for high protein content (Editorial, 2009). In fact, adulteration lowers the quality of food and most of the time, toxic chemicals are also added to various food products, causing a danger to health. Even the addition of toxic chemicals beyond the 'safe levels' becomes toxic to health when it is consumed.

Though food safety authorities are implementing stringent rules and regulations on food safety, still small vendors and businessmen cheat the consumers to a large extent. The Annual Public Laboratory Testing Report (2014-15) put forward by FSSAI proved that out of the tested 49,290 samples of food items, nearly one-fifth (8,469) were found to be adulterated or misbranded. Moreover, in developing countries, incidents of food-borne diseases through food poisoning and intoxications occur extensively than in the developed world but remain not well established. Here the consumption of unhygienic water and food are the most common and leading causes of death (Al-Mamun et al„ 2018).

Due to the emergence of advanced methods of adulterating foods, the need for developing highly efficient and reliable detection techniques against fraudulent manipulations and increased scientific researches should be conducted to protect the naive consumers from emerging health risks and the producers from huge economic losses (Schieber, 2018). This chapter addresses effective, high-performance techniques focusing on detection of adulterants in food.

The Most Common Food Items that are Adulterated and its Associated Side Effects

Table 1. List of common foods, adulterants used and harmful effects.

Table 1 contd....

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