PRACTICAL RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE APPLICATION OF METHODS FOR DETECTION OF COUNTERFEITS OF DAIRY PRODUCTS

Abstract

An analysis was made of the types and characteristics of the influence of counterfeit products on human health, the main sources of their toxicological danger, and the state of legislative and regulato-ry documents regarding the technical conditions and requirements for the quality of dairy products in Ukraine and other countries, and the existing laboratory methods for determining their quality and safety. The necessity of introducing requirements for the types of analyzes in Ukraine into the existing regulatory documentation in the form of technical conditions is considered. It is proposed to introduce a new method of analysis to identify vegetable fat in falsified milk fat substitutes. It is proposed to focus on the composition of the sterol fraction, which highly depends on the nature of the fat: animal or veg-etable origin when evaluating the test results of dairy products. If the content of only milk fat in the sterol fraction should be only cholesterol. It is absent in vegetable fats, but other sterols are present: brassicasterin, campasterin, stigmasterol, β-sterol and others. Thus, the falsification assessment of the fat component of dairy products is established by comparing the obtained ratios of the mass fractions of methyl esters of fatty acids or their amounts with well-studied average indicators. For the practice of laboratories, it is more appropriate to determine the Reichert-Meissl number, which is one of the constants of the milk fat and characterizes the content of low molecular weight wa-ter-soluble volatile fatty acids in 5 g of fat. If for milk fat this number is from 20 to 37, then for vegeta-ble fats the Reichert-Meissl number is from 0.3 to 2.5 for corn and respectively 6-9 for coconut, 4-7 for palm kernel, 0.1-1.5 for palm fats. It is also possible to use another constant – iodine value. It charac-terizes the content of unsaturated acids in fat and makes it possible to distinguish milk fat from vegeta-ble. In this case, use the ratio of iodine number and Reichert-Meissl number, which for milk fat is 2.5, and for vegetable fats from 90.8 (palm) to 754.2 (sunflower). This technique can be effectively used to detect counterfeits of dairy products.