Easy determination of the addition of soybean proteins to heat-processed meat products prepared with turkey meat or pork−turkey meat blends that could also contain milk proteins

Abstract

The addition of non-meat proteins to processed meat products is limited by regulations. Therefore, this work has investigated the determination of added soybean proteins in commercial heat-processed meat products prepared with turkey meat or pork−turkey meat blends that could also contain milk proteins. The method consisted of extracting proteins from the meat products in a Tris-HCl buffer (pH 8) and analysing the extract by high-performance liquid chromatography with a linear gradient water−acetonitrile containing 0.05% (v/v) TFA. This method enabled the detection and quantitation of up to 0.08 and 0.28% (w/w), respectively, of soybean proteins (related to 6 g initial product) in these products. Satisfactory precision and recovery data were established. Accuracy was evaluated by a comparison of soybean protein contents determined by the proposed method and the existing AOAC official method based on an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) from which no statistically significant differences were observed.

Keywords:

• Soybean proteins
• meat products
• perfusion chromatography
• turkey meat
• milk proteins
• adulteration

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain (Project No. 07G/0025/2003) and the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, Spain (Project No. FIT-060000-2002-37, Programa de Fomento de la Investigación Técnica (PROFIT)) for financial support. The PROFIT project was developed in collaboration with Campofrío Alimentación S. A., Spain. F. C.-R. also thanks the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Spain, for a grant.