Prefabricated baby food is under strict EU legislation by Commission Regulation (EC) 1881/2006 Setting maximum levels for certain contaminants in foodstuffs regarding the maximum allowed content of potentially harmful elements. For potentially toxic trace elements the regulated maximum content is regulated for lead, cadmium, mercury, inorganic tin, inorganic arsenic, cesium, copper and manganese. The Swedish national food agency (Livsmedelsverket) conducts chemical analyses of the regulated elements by full microwave acid digestion followed by Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) analysis. In this study a simple artificial in vitro digestion method was developed using a commercially available enzyme supplement and optimized to determine the bio-accessible amount of eight potentially harmful metal trace elements that are associated with modern electronics (lithium, vanadium, cobalt, nickel, arsenic, selenium, cadmium and lead) in five prefabricated baby meals from the Swedish market by well-established manufacturers. The results were compared to the total mass content as well as the regulated limits and toxicological literature data. The samples had analyte dry mass contents that were extractable by the developed in vitro method that ranged from 0.0314 μg g-1 to 0.0691 μg g-1 for lithium, 9.42*10-5 μg g-1 to 0.0152 μg g-1 for vanadium, 6.61*10-3 μg g-1 to 30.9*10-3 μg g-1 for cobalt, 0.0599 μg g-1 to 0.194 μg g-1 for nickel, 4.54*10-4 μg g-1 to 0.0431 μg g-1 for arsenic, 8.87*10-4 μg g-1 to 9.85*10-3 μg g-1 for cadmium and 1.24*10-3 μg g-1 to 0.0232 μg g-1 for lead. Selenium was not detected in any of the samples. None of the samples were found to contain toxic levels of any of the quantified elements. Comparisons and paired t-tests of recoveries between the in vitro digestion and control procedures consisting of digestion solutions that exclude either enzymes, pH adjustment or both suggested that lithium, cobalt and cadmium were protein bound and that the digestion enzymes used had a statistically significant effected on the recovery. With further optimization and more extensive comparison to reference data the method could potentially be established as a simple and affordable alternative to more elaborate methods for screening or small scale analysis of the bio-accessible fraction of metal trace elements in food.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:oru-99723 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Andersson, Marcus |
| Publisher | Örebro universitet, Institutionen för naturvetenskap och teknik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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