Food additives: From functions to analytical methods

Abstract

Food additives refer to all kinds of trace substances used in food or food processing to preserve flavor or enhance food taste, appearance, or other qualities. At present, artificial synthetic food additives have gradually replaced the natural food additives and many problems related to food additives, involving the abuse of food additives, excessive additives or even toxic additives. Obviously, food additives can bring people great sensory enjoyment and commercial convenience, but they may also cause potential risks to human health. So, it is of high significance to conduct quantitative analysis on the content of food additives. According to their functions and the regulatory requirements of food additives, this review starts from the classification and structures of various food additives involving colorants, preservatives, antioxidants, sweeteners, emulsifiers, stabilizers, thickeners, gelling agents. It then summarizes and discusses analytical methods for quantification of food additives including modern immunoassays and other biotechnological methods. The proposed review aspires to fill in the knowledge gap of food additives between academia and industry by covering all kinds of analytical methods for quantifying food additives.

Keywords:

• analytical methods
• food additives
• food additives regulation
• molecular structure and technique

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31801638), the fund of Key Laboratory of Fermentation Engineering (Ministry of Education) (202105FE09), and the Hainan University Start-up Scientific Research Projects of China (KYQD(ZR)-21044). Guozhen Liu acknowledges the financial support by the University Development Fund (UDF01002012) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen).