Abstract
Honey adulteration is a major issue in food production, which may reduce the effective components in honey and have a detrimental effect on human health. Herein, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) combined with chemometric methods was used to fast quantify the adulterant content. Two common types of adulteration, including mixing acacia honey with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and rape honey, were quantified with univariate analysis and partial least squares regression (PLSR). In addition, the variable importance was tested with univariable analysis and feature selection methods (genetic algorithm (GA), variable importance in projection (VIP), selectivity ratio (SR)). The results indicated that emissions from Mg II 279.58, 280.30 nm, Mg I 285.25 nm, Ca II 393.37, 396.89 nm, Ca I 422.70 nm, Na I 589.03, 589.64 nm, and K I 766.57, 769.97 nm had compact relationship with adulterant content. Best models for detecting the adulteration ratio of HFCS 55, HFCS 90, and rape honey were achieved by SR-PLSR, VIP-PLSR, and VIP-PLSR, with root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 8.9%, 8.2%, and 4.8%, respectively. This study provided a fast and simple approach for detecting honey adulteration.
Highlights
Food adulteration is an illegal activity of food production, which may threaten food quality and safety
Acacia honey was considered as pure honey, and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) (F55 and F90) and rape honey were used as adulterants
Honey adulteration was prepared by mixing the acacia honey with HFCS F55, HFCS F90, and rape honey
Summary
Food adulteration is an illegal activity of food production, which may threaten food quality and safety. One is to mix pure honey with sugar-based adulterants, and the other is to adulterate high-quality honey with inferior honey. These two cases will be explored in this study. The results highlighted the use of physical and chemical parameters to detect honey adulteration. The elemental information of honey can be obtained through analyzing the atomic emission spectroscopy from plasma which is induced by a laser It has the advantages of fast detection, multi-elemental analysis, and environmentally friendly feature [10]. Because LIBS spectrum often contains numerous variables, chemometric methods are usually used to figure out the useful information and establish models for food adulteration detection. The specific objectives were to: (1) analyze the LIBS spectral features of pure honey and adulterants; (2) determine the feature variables that are related to adulteration; (3) quantify the adulterant content with univariate and multivariate analysis
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