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B3-IL: APPLICATION OF HIGH-SPEED TIME-OF-FLIGHT MASS SPECTROMETRY:
A STRATEGY FOR OBTAINING ACCURATE RESULTS IN FOOD SAFETY ANALYSIS
T. Kovalczuk, J. Zrostlíková, J. Schůrek
LECO Corp. Application Laboratory Prague
Sokolovská 219, Prague 9 – Vysočany, 190 00, Czech Republic
(tomas.kovalczuk@leco.cz)
Obesity is a civilization illness affecting millions of people around the world. To fight against obesity, people have been looking for alternative treatments such as phytotherapeutic formulations. These natural products are generally considered to have no side health effects. However, there exist numerous studies demonstrating the presence of non-declared synthetic substances in these so-called „natural products“ [1]. Adulteration of natural products is done by the producers to give higher efficiency to their formulations, however the consumer is cheated in better case; in worse cases serious negative health effects can occur by overdosing with the synthetic substance [2].
Sibutramine (usually available as sibutramine hydrochloride monohydrate) is an appetite suppressant used in obesity treatment in the past. In March 2010 the European Commission has stopped the registration the sibutramine-containing medicines. Recently some findings of sibutramine in „natural“ green coffee were reported [3]. The analytical methods on sibutramine in literature are scarce and often require relatively complicated sample preparation procedure.
In our contribution we demonstrate a simple SPME GC-TOF method for determination of abused sibutramine that was detected and identified in 3 samples obtained from retail market in Serbia. Also other examples of GC-TOF method applied within the food samples’ examination and food safety analysis will be shown.
References
- Carvalho et al., Forensic Sci. Int., in press
- Jung et al., Forensic Sci. Int. 2006, 161, 221-222.
- 48th Meeting of the Serbian Chemical Society, Faculty of Technology Novi Sad, Serbia (2010).
