Rapid Quantitative Analysis of Multi-component Supplements for Antioxidation Using Ultra High-speed LC

Abstract

Due to the aging of Japanese societies, people have become aware of the importance of self-managing of their health, and thus health food has been very popular in recent years. In 2013, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare announced that the elongation of a health of life expectancy is of importance in order to suppress the increment of healthcare spending. Under these circumstances, the market for health foods and supplements is expected to expand. Since there are no strict regulations of the manufacturing and marketing for health foods and supplements, it is said that some products claims positive effects even in the absence of any conclusive evidence. In addition, the amounts of effective components in health foods and supplements are not shown for many products. Under these conditions, determinations of the amounts of the effective components in health foods and supplements is crucial for safety when using these products. In 2013, Consumer Affairs Agency began investigating a new certification mark system concerning the functionality of foods, and has also been going forward in the development of display methods for them. In recent years, vitamin E and polyphenol related products founded in supplements or health foods have been consumed in daily life. Although these products may make consumers think that they are more effective than those foods that contain only one effective component, there is no evidence as to whether several components interact with each other to affect their activity. Therefore, it is of great importance to precisely measure the amounts of the effective components in foods. In this research, we chose multi-component supplements that included vitamin E derivatives and polyphenols, and investigated a rapid analysis method for these active components. Vitamin Es and polyphenols have widely different polarities, and thus rapid measurements of these compounds at the same time is difficult to active by using conventional methods. Thus, we applied an ultra high-speed LC system equipped with a photo-diode array detector to determine the quantities of vitamin E and polyphenols at once, even if they have very different retention times. As a result, eight vitamin E derivatives were found to be able to be analyzed in a short time. In addition, the results of the present work suggested that health foods and supplements are analyzable by our method to provide information about containing effective compounds.