Food adulteration refers to the act of intentionally debasing the quality of food by either adding or replacing the food substances with undeclared alternative components, or by the removal of some valuable components. This is usually done to lower the cost or increase the bulk of a given food product. This has been a major concern among consumers as it is often undesirable from an economic, health, religious, or legal standpoint. Meat adulteration in comminuted and highly processed meat products is a widespread practice in some retail markets where meat species with higher commercial value have been replaced or substituted with lower value or undesirable alternatives. In addition, fraudulent adulteration of food products with undeclared components might cause health problems such as allergies in sensitized individuals. The 2012 horse meat scandal in Europe, in which horse meat was found in beef products has raised public concern with respect to meat authentication. Although horse meat is a consumable product in its own right and harmless to human health, the general public responded negatively to the fraudulent meat. Furthermore, several religions have strict dietary laws relating to meat animal species. For Muslims, for example, consumption of pork and other porcine derivatives is prohibited among devotees. Food authentication and, in particular, identification of component species in meat products is, therefore, important in order to control food quality and safety as well as to protect consumers’ rights.
The analytical techniques commonly used for meat species identification can be broadly divided into protein-based and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)-based techniques. The protein-based methods include immunological assays, electrophoretic, and chromatographic techniques. These methods are fast and easy to perform and the investment in equipment is much less compared to DNA-based methods. The use of these methods for meat species identification is limited when assaying thermally processed foods due to the denaturation of proteins. More recently, DNA-based methods have been used as an alternative to protein analysis in meat species identification as DNA molecules are more stable when compared to proteins and allow analysis of processed and heat-treated products. In addition, DNA molecules are present in most biological tissues and can, therefore, be extracted from a variety of tissues. All these factors make them a good choice for differentiation and identification of components in food. Among the DNA-based methods used in species identification, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which involves highly specific amplification of one or more DNA fragments is the most well-developed method due to its simplicity, rapidness, specificity, and sensitivity for species identification in foods. A number of PCR techniques have been used for meat species identification and these include PCR-sequencing, PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP), PCR with species-specific primers, PCR-random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD), and real-time PCR. Protein-based and DNA-based methods currently used in meat species identification are described below.
Food adulteration is an evolving concept due to increased detection methods for contaminants (“we're catching more fraud”) as well as the growing opportunity for fraudsters to profit from the acts (expanding global markets). The food adulteration risks are being considered from sources across the food protection spectrum including food quality, food safety, food fraud, and food defense. Any food product that is a public health threat is classified as the effect of adulteration though there may be many different types of causes or motivations. Food fraud is a broader term that includes the cause of motivation of the incident. To stay ahead of the growing scope, scale, and threat, new countermeasure approaches are being developed to more efficiently and effectively detect and deter.
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