Olive oil, milk, honey, saffron, orange juice, coffee, and apple juice
In new research published in the April Journal of Food Science, analyses of the first known public database compiling reports on food fraud and economically motivated adulteration in food highlight the most fraud-prone ingredients in the food supply; analytical detection methods; and the type of fraud reported. Based on a review of records from scholarly journals, the top seven adulterated ingredients in the database are olive oil, milk, honey, saffron, orange juice, coffee, and apple juice.
The database was created by the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP), a nonprofit scientific organization that develops standards to help ensure the identity, quality and purity of food ingredients, dietary supplements and pharmaceuticals. USP’s food ingredient standards are published in the Food Chemicals Codex (FCC) compendium. The new database provides baseline information to assist interested parties in assessing the risks of specific products. It includes a total of 1,305 records for food fraud based on a total of 660 scholarly, media and other publicly available reports. Records are divided by scholarly research (1,054 records) and media reports (251 records). Researchers are Drs. Jeffrey C. Moore (lead author) and Markus Lipp of USP, and Dr. John Spink of Michigan State University.
Food fraud was recently defined in a report commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security and funded by the National Center for Food Protection and Defense (University of Minnesota) as a collective term that encompasses the deliberate substitution, addition, tampering or misrepresentation of food, food ingredients or food packaging, or false or misleading statements made about a product for economic gain. A more specific type of fraud, intentional or economically motivated adulteration of food ingredients has been defined by USP’s Expert Panel on Food Ingredient Intentional Adulterants as the fraudulent addition of nonauthentic substances or removal or replacement of authentic substances without the purchaser’s knowledge for economic gain of the seller.
“This database is a critical step in protecting consumers,” said Dr. Spink. “Food fraud and economically motivated adulteration have not received the warranted attention given the potential danger they present. We recently defined these terms [see the Journal of Food Science, November 2011] and now we are defining the scope and scale. As many do not believe a concept or risk exists if it does not appear in a scholarly journal, we believe that publication of this paper in the Journal of Food Science will allow us to advance the science of food fraud prevention.”
While traditionally considered primarily an economic issue and less a consumer safety threat, authors of the paper, Development and Application of a Database of Food Ingredient Fraud and Economically Motivated Adulteration from 1980 to 2010, defined empirically that in some ways food fraud may be more risky than traditional threats to the food supply. The adulterants used in these activities often are unconventional and designed to avoid detection through routine analyses. Melamine, for example, was considered neither a potential contaminant nor an adulterant in the food supply before the episodes of adulteration of pet food in 2007 and infant formula and other milk products in 2008 (with tainted products still appearing sporadically today, principally in China). Although, as records from this database indicate, melamine was used as an adulterant to mimic protein as early as 1979; however, this remained virtually unknown until 2007. Hence, testing for melamine was not included in routine quality assurance or quality control analyses.
Additionally, current food protection systems are not designed to look for the nearly infinite number of potential adulterants that may show up in the food supply.
via Science Daily ᔥ
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