engleski

THE ROLE OF STABLE ISOTOPES IN THE ANALYSIS OF FOOD

Consumers today are aware of the impact of food and its composition on human health, and many are willing to pay a high price for products they consider to be of high quality, whether because of production methods, such as organic food, or for other reasons, such as geographical origin. As market demands increase, food fraud is becoming more common, whether through the mislabelling of food ingredients or the substitution of some ingredients with cheaper, less nutritious ones. An important contribution to solving these problems has come from the development of modern techniques such as isotope mass spectrometry, IRMS (Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry), which can be used to obtain data on isotopic composition. Indeed, the isotopic profile of a substance is the result of the isotopic composition of the parent material, a combination of the stable isotopic ratios of a number of elements such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur (13C/12C, 2H/1H, 15N/14N, 18O/16O, 34S/32S) already formed during the formation of the Earth and the physical, chemical and biochemical transformations they have undergone over time. Therefore, the isotopic profile is unique to the origin and history of the substance or sample. The determination of the stable isotope ratio can be applied to almost all types of food. As part of the project “Center for safety and quality of food“, we have started to create a map of stable isotopes for honey samples from different parts of the Republic of Croatia.

Stable isotope ratio ; Geographical origin ; Food fraud ; IRMS

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