Determinação de edulcorantes em alimentos por cromatografia líquida: uma revisão

Abstract

In the past few decades, sweeteners have gained importance in the food industry. This tendency is based on economic, sensory and health aspects. Sweeteners are substances of different origins and physico-chemical properties with a common feature of mimicking the sweet taste in foods by adding little or no calories. Due to the high availability of products with sweeteners, the risk of excessive consumption of sweeteners is increased, which can cause adverse effects to human health. Thus, it is necessary to develop methods capable of monitoring and quantifying sweeteners in food matrices. The analysis of several sweeteners simultaneously is a difficult task because sweeteners have few common physico-chemical characteristics. In this sense, techniques based on liquid chromatography are the method of choice due to the ease of application and the possibility of coupling a range of detectors such as ultraviolet or mass spectrometry. The latter stands out for its high sensitivity and multianalytical capacity, but it is still a high-cost technique for analytical routine. However, most of the available methods analyze only one group of sweeteners. Further studies are needed to develop multi-analytical methods for all sweeteners permitted under Brazilian law.