Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy in Food Analysis

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a powerful spectroscopic technique, conventionally used for structure verification, elucidation, and purity analysis in chemistry. NMR is a fast, reproducible, and nondestructive technique to provide detailed information of the compounds with little or no treatment required in the food samples. This makes NMR a suitable technique for the food analysis and is still a relatively underutilized methodology in the area of food science. It is due to its high cost, relatively low sensitivity, and required skills. The aim of this chapter is to explain NMR methodologies in the field of food analysis. This chapter covers the basic principles of NMR and its methodologies followed by their applications in food quality control and authentication (i.e., discrimination of foods based on different raw materials and its origin). In addition, a description of the chemometrics is provided considering combined NMR and multivariate statistical analysis. This combination is a powerful approach for addressing modern challenges in food quality control and authentication. In addition to standard NMR techniques, sophisticated NMR applications especially in hyphenation with other techniques are presented.