Food Adulteration

Food Safety means the absence of health hazards. Food can be risky for consumers when it’s altered, contaminated, and altered.

• Altered food by intentionally causes altered in its organoleptic features (taste, color, odor, and texture) chemical composition or nutrition’s value (even if it’s safe, it shouldn’t be used).
• Contaminated food by accident holding microorganisms, chemical, radioactive, or foreign objectives substances; the product could look healthy but could produce harm or illness.
• Harmful food causes a negative effect, either immediately or by repeated intake. Certain food is harmful to a specific group of people like allergens.
• Adulterated food was deliberated added a substance. Its composition, weight or volume change to cover any defect. Some examples are present by adding wine, milk fat substitution of vegetables or water, and any other substance. This was made to deceive the consumer, by offering manipulated products in order to obtain economic gain. It’s important to understand that manipulated products can harm consumers health. In the beginning, man preserved food. He learned how to dry, salt and smoke food for an extended time and improved the flavor to hide bad properties in the food. Bit by bit, food was altered, discovering food substitution hiding the organoleptic features on the product.

It was confirmed, chop bovine meat had a mix of other kinds of beef. Many fraud reports were increased due to misleading labeling, for example, fish labels had the fish name changed, making it difficult to know the type of fish; altering Tequila did by mixing cheap alcohol (ethanol) like sugar cane, which increases its volume.

How do you detect altered food or beverage?

Detecting altered food and drinks isn’t an easy task because these products have similar ingredients to authentic products. Therefore, having a quick analytic and precise methods will help to detect adulterer food or beverages and represent an important step by identifying the problem.

Due to the complexity of the altered product, traditional methodology of measurement (for example total sugar, pH, °Bx, electricity conductivity, humidity %, among others) seems not enough moments that allow us to accurately identify the altered products. In view of the above, new methodologies have been developed helping to detect this problem. Nowadays, they are regulating bodies worldwide providing support and guidance to detect several types of food adulteration like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States, as well as the Federal Consumer Protection Agency (PROFECO), the Federal Commission for Protection against Health Risks (COFEPRIS) in Mexico.

Another tool we can use when detecting these products is to be aware of this kind of article and conduct a thrilling analysis of the product from a specialized laboratory.