The Detection And Evaluation Of Some Constant Food Additives

Food which makes safety a priority is of the utmost importance to everyone. At present, the whole society is putting more and more emphasis on the food quality and safety issue, of which the abuse of food additives becomes the distinct manifestation. Therefore, the selection, also the inspection and identification of food additives is becoming a hot spot of the social attention.This paper mainly studied on the inspection methods for food additives(antiseptic and sweetening agents). By the comparative study on the GC-FID method together with the HPLC-DAD method to inspect the residue of dehydroacetic acid and p-hydroxybenzoates (nipagin esters), we found the HPLC-DAD method is preferable.This paper also optimized the examination method. By reversed-phase high -performance liquid chromatography with gradient elution, using diode array detector, we can make simultaneous determination of dehydroacetic acid, which formerly used gas chromatography, together with other usual food additives, such as acesulfame potassium, benzoic acid, sorbic acid and saccharin sodium, under the same condition. It will simplify the inspection institution more convenient but provide a foundation to the constitution of industry standards as well.Under a certain condition, the detection limits by gas chromatography for determination of ethyl nipagin ester, propyl nipagin ester and dehydroacetic acid were 0.0026, 0.0030 and 0.0023 mg/kg. the detection limits by liquid chromatography for ethyl nipagin ester; propyl nipagin ester were0.0012, 0.0018 mg/kg.At the same circumstances, the detection limits by liquid chromatography for simultaneous determination of the five food additives, acesulfame potassium (AK), benzoic acid (BA), sorbic acid (SOR), saccharin sodium (SA) and dehydroacetic acid (DHA) were 0.0002, 0.0001, 0.0002, 0.0005 and 0.0022 mg/kg. They also got good separation and the linear regression coefficients of the calibration curves were all above 0.9990. The stability of the instrument was good while the reproducibility also met the request of analysis examinations.Through inspections of several kinds of foods, we didn't found any contents of food additives were impermissibly high over the standards but more than one kind of food additive, which take the same effect, was used in some foods.