|
|
|
|
HerbalEGram: Volume 10, Number 2, February 2013
Food Fraud Database Indicates Increase in
Reports of Black Pepper and Tea Adulteration
The
United States Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) has expanded its Food Fraud Database with the addition of about
800 new entries that document reports of food adulteration primarily from 2011 and 2012.1
These new records indicate that the food products most frequently associated
with adulteration are milk, vegetable oils, spices, seafood, clouding agents,
and lemon juice.
Food fraud has been defined as as “the deliberate substitution, addition, tampering, or
misrepresentation of food, food ingredients, or food packaging, or false or
misleading statements made about a product for economic gain.”2 The
term also includes economically motivated adulteration of food ingredients,
which USP defines as “the fraudulent addition of non-authentic substances or
removal or replacement of authentic substances without the purchaser’s
knowledge for economic gain to the seller.”3
With its recent update, the Food Fraud Database contains reports primarily from 1980 to 2012, along with a limited number of earlier reports, both from
scholarly sources, such as academic journal articles, and articles published in
the trade and mainstream media.1 The most frequently reported ingredients
in an analysis of the 2011/2012 collection of scholarly sources include olive
oil (Olea europaea), milk, saffron
(Crocus sativus),
honey, coffee (Coffea arabica), tea (Camellia sinensis), fish, clouding agents, and black pepper (Piper nigrum). Interestingly, while olive oil, saffron, and
coffee were top-reported items in previous years’ analyses, tea, fish, clouding
agents, and black pepper were not — suggesting that more reports on the adulteration of these
products have been found. Alternately, the increase could be due to a
heightened awareness of food fraud in general and a resulting increase in
studies on and examinations of suspected products and ingredients.
Black peppercorn. ©2013 Sanjay Ach.
An analysis of the database’s 2011/2012 media data shows milk, fish, turmeric (Curcuma longa), chili powder (Capsicum spp.), cooking oil, shrimp, lemon juice (Citrus x limon), and maple syrup (Acer spp.) among the most frequently reported foods associated
with fraud. While the other products have been top-reported items in years
past, shrimp, lemon juice, and maple syrup were new to the list. According to
USP’s press release on the analyses, “In the category of oils, olive oil
replaced with other, less-expensive vegetable oils was pervasive, and so-called
‘gutter oil’ (waste oil repurposed as cooking oil) was documented in China.
With regard to spices, the database shows examples of the dilution or
replacement of spices with less-expensive spices or fillers.”
When using the database, one can perform a search for an ingredient category, such
as “spice,” or for a more specific food or ingredient, like “chocolate” or
“olive oil.” The search will return a list of reported entries that users can filter, and users can
click on each individual entry for more detailed information on the fraud,
including the report type (scholarly or media), ingredient, adulterant, type of
fraud (replacement or addition), detection method used, year the report was
published, author of the published report, and a full reference to the report.4
A database search for “tea,” for example, returns 21 items, one of which
describes the adulteration of tea leaves through the addition of leaves from
plants in the genus Plumbago as
reported by Ellis et al. in the
2012 article “Fingerprinting Food: Current Technologies for the Detection of
Food Adulteration and Contamination,” published in the journal Chemical Society Reviews.
Results from Food Fraud Database searches must be interpreted with a grain of
salt, however. The aforementioned article in Chemical Society Reviews, for example, is an article discussing historical
food adulteration cases reported in the 1820s and 1850s.5 So,
although this article shows up in the database as being a 2012 report, the
actual case of tea adulteration was reported more than 100 years ago. Likewise,
closer inspection of an article published on the trade media website
FoodNavigatorUSA.com — also a result from the tea search — is based on one
anecdotal quote from a moringa company president that casually suggests that Moringa oleifera (also known as
horseradish tree) supposedly had been adulterated with tea: “I have seen some
samples [of moringa] out in the market that are grey in color or cut or with
teas and grass powders.”6 So, while there is no doubt that USP’s
Food Fraud Database provides interesting information that members of the food
and dietary supplements industries could use to identify potential threats to
purity, and possibly safety, its contents must be looked into further before conclusive
statements are made about the authenticity of a specific product or ingredient.
—Lindsay Stafford Mader
References
1. New additions increase number of records in USP Food Fraud Database by 60
percent, add seafood, clouding agents, and lemon juice as foods vulnerable to
fraud [press release]. Rockville, MD: United States Pharmacopeial Convention;
January 23, 2012. Available here. Accessed January 31, 2013.
2. Spink J, Moyer DC. Defining the public health thread of food fraud. J Food Sci. 2011;76(9):R157-162.
3. Moore JC, Spink J, Lipp M. Development and application of a database of food ingredient fraud and economically motivated adulteration from 1980-2012. J Food Sci. 2012;77(4):R118-126.
4. USP Food Fraud Database. Available at: www.foodfraud.org. Accessed January 25,
2013.
5. Ellis DI, Brewster VL, Dunn WB, Allwood JW, Golovanov AP, Goodacre R.
Fingerprinting food: current technologies for the detection of food adulteration
and contamination. Chemical Society
Reviews. 2012;41(17):5706-5727. Available here. Accessed January 25, 2013.
6. Watson E. Superfood alert: Could Moringa
oleifera be the next baobab? NutraIngredients-USA.com. April 13, 2012.
Available here. Accessed January 25, 2013.
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|