Nitrates and nitrites give handled meats their trademark pink tone and strong flavor. Although many consumers should limit their use of these additives because they can form potentially harmful compounds, determining how much is in a food has been difficult. Presently, scientists reporting in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces have fostered a variety of changing films that buyers can stick onto food sources and effectively dissect nitrite levels by snapping an image with a cell phone.
Restored and handled meats, like salami and bacon, are frequently treated with nitrite or nitrate salts to keep them looking and tasting new. However, because nitrate is somewhat stable, it tends to be completely converted to the more receptive nitrite particle in the body. At the point when in the acidic climate of the stomach or under the high intensity of a griddle, nitrite can go through a response to nitrosamines, which have been connected to the improvement of different tumors. A few strategies to decide nitrite levels in food sources currently exist, but they are not very buyer-friendly and frequently require costly and difficult methods and instruments. To assist buyers with pursuing more educated choices, Sal Vallejos, José M. Garca and partners needed to create a simple-to-utilize nitrite evaluation framework.
To achieve this, the scientists created a film they called “POLYSEN,” which means “polymeric sensor,” made of four monomers and hydrochloric acid. Plates punched from the material were put on meat tests for 15 minutes, permitting the monomer units and corrosive in the film to respond with nitrite in a four-step azo coupling response. The plates were then taken out and dunked in a sodium hydroxide solution briefly to foster the variety. At the point when nitrite was available, the film’s yellowish tint extended to higher nitrite levels in the food. To quantitate the variety change, the scientists made a cell phone application that self-aligns when a graph of reference plates is shot in a similar picture as the example circles.
The group tried the film on meats they arranged and treated with nitrite, notwithstanding locally acquired meats, and found that the POLYSEN-based strategy created results like those obtained with a customary and more intricate nitrite location technique. Furthermore, POLYSEN adhered to a European guideline for the transfer of substances from film to food. The scientists say the new methodology could be an easy-to-use and cheap way for buyers to decide nitrite levels in food sources.
More information: “Easy Nitrite Analysis of Processed Meat with Colorimetric Polymer Sensors and a Smartphone App” ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (2022). pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.2c09467
Journal information: ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces
