Analysis of some sweeteners and sugars by ATR, NIR and Raman spectroscopy
Burcu Guven1, SerapDurakli Velioglu2*, Ismail Hakki Boyaci1
1 Department of Food Engineering, Faculty of Engineering(Hacettepe University, Turkey)
2Department of Food Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture (Namik Kemal University, Turkey)
Abstract
Sweeteners and sugar alternatives in food technology having been permitted to be used in food and/or beverage products are at limited levels. Nevertheless, it should be noted that synthetic sweeteners like synthetic food additives are xenobiotic substances which are foreign substances to humans1. The quality control of food and/or beverage products should be analyzed by the manufacturers2. In the literature, various methods (chromatographic, electrophoretic, and mass spectrometric methods, etc.) were performed for analysis and monitoring the content of sweeteners in food and/or beverage products2,3. However, these methods require expensive equipment, toxic chemicals and long preparation steps. On the other hand, spectroscopic techniques have been widely used for the rapid and sensitive analysis of food and/or beverage products4,5.The aim of the study was to determine the vibrational characteristics of various sweeteners and sugars using attenuated total reflection (ATR), near Infrared (NIR) and Raman spectroscopy. The spectra of various sugars (sucrose, galactose, fructose, glucose) and sweeteners (saccharin, sucralose, neotame, acesulfame K and rebaudioside A) were recorded. The obtained spectral information can serve as reference fortheinterpretation of spectralstudies of variousfoodand/orbeverageproductscontainingsugarsand/orsweeteners.
Keywords ATR spectroscopy, NIR spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, Sweeteners
