Metodologia para autenticação de alecrim e hortelã orgânicos utilizando espectroscopia UV-Vis associada a quimiometria

Abstract

The search for healthy food has been growing in recent years, as a large part of the population has been more concerned with health, combined with this, adulteration (one of the types of food fraud) has become a growing problem in the food industry and also for consumers. In between the foods with a high incidence of adulteration are organic foods, which are foods produced with the minimum use of extra-agricultural inputs. Among organic foods, rosemary and mint are herbs that stand out for characteristics such as antioxidants, antibacterial, anti-cancer, in addition to being used in the pharmaceutical industry, they are also used in the cosmetics, perfumery and food preservative industries. Because organic foods have a higher cost compared to conventional ones, they can be targets of adulteration, so their authenticity is necessary. The most used techniques to perform such authentication are expensive and require longer analysis time, thinking about this, the objective of the work was to develop an alternative methodology for the authentication of conventional and organic samples of rosemary and mint, using UV-VIS spectroscopy coupled with the chemometric tools control chart based on PCA and DD-SIMCA. As a result, both chemometric methods were effective in realizing the authenticity of organic herbs. The control chart results showed efficient classification for organic and non-organic rosemary samples and correct prediction for adulterated samples, as well as non-organic Brazilian samples. The model authentication for organic mint (DD-SIMCA) achieved 100% sensitivity for the training set, and validation and a specificity of 94% for validation, proving to be a completely effective model in organic mint authentication as well as validation detection of organic mint adulteration.