Food Poisoning and Intoxication: A Global Leading Concern for Human Health

Food adulteration is a very old and common problem, which is often seen in both the low- and middle-income countries and sometimes even in some developed countries. The problem level is greater in low-economic zone like Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, and African countries. Food adulteration is a mostly practiced phenomenon in Bangladesh. Consumers are helpless in front of unlawful acts of some unscrupulous importers, producers, wholesaler, or retailers, simply to increase profits with less capital and equipment. Hazardous chemicals such as calcium carbide, sodium cyclamate, cyanide, and formalin are widely used for ripening green tropical fruits, to keep them fresh, and for preserving until sale (Amin et al., 2004; The Daily Prothom Alo, 2005). Low-cost textile dyes are used in coloring vegetables, fruits, popular sweetmeats, soft drinks, beverages, confectioneries to draw customers’ attention. 

Fishmongers are preserving fish with formalin to keep the body solid to cover up internal decomposition. Intake of such types of chemically treated food may cause complex diseases and has direct consequences such as liver and kidney failure, autism, metabolic dysfunctions, and cancer.

In recent years, adulteration incident in food has attracted increasing attention by consumers and has now become a big issue in numerous countries. The food adulteration is currently recognized as a big threat to public health due to economic gain. Economically motivated food adulteration is mixing unsafe substances, along with illegal substances. It is high time to address this problem from intervention to prevention (Banerjee et al., 2017; Spink and Moyer, 2011). The isotopic content and distribution in molecules from plants and animals are influenced by environmental factors and synthetic routes, so that they can be used to trace back the origin of a given compound by a chemically identical molecule coming from another source. Methods for detecting the “synthetic” or “natural” origin of a chemical species are based on isotopic analysis. Isotope ratio mass spectrometry provides the overall molecular isotope content, but cannot directly measure the isotopic ratios at several positions in a given molecule. One of the most notable contributions of high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to food authentication is its use in measuring the isotopic content, at the natural abundance level, of specific molecular sites in a given species. The technique, known as Specific Natural Isotopic Fractionation (SNIF-NMR) for site-specific natural isotope fractionation studied by NMR, was developed in the early 1980s by Professors Gerard and Maryvonne Martin. This improves the performance of isotopic methods and supplies genuine proof of the “natural” or “synthetic” origin of a molecule.

Food Adulteration Is a Criminal Act of Potential Safety Concern

Economically motivated adulteration (EMA) is of increasing concern for society. It deprives the consumer of the quality products they intend to purchase, decreasing consumer trust and leading potentially to significant consequences on human health (Spink and Moyer, 2011; Everstine et al., 2013). To maintain consumer trust, food companies must remain alert to potential adulteration and work actively with their suppliers to identify and mitigate the associated risks (Stadler et al., 2017). This requires industries to implement an effective food adulteration management system.