Two students, Thach Kien Thi Linh Da and Nguyen Ngoc Quy, Ho Chi Minh City University of Industry and Trade, are the winners of the First Prize in the 2023 Science and Technology Competition for students in higher education institutions with the topic "Research on the process of analyzing the authenticity of milk fat using the HPLC method".

The topic stems from the fact that milk and dairy products are increasingly popular and have become essential foods in the daily diet. One of the main components that determines the structure, flavor and nutritional properties of these products is milk fat.

However, milk fat is an expensive ingredient, so manufacturers tend to use modern technology to replace (all or part of) milk fat with cheaper exotic fats without the necessary labeling.

The study by Linh Da and Ngoc Quy was evaluated to have established a simple and rapid analytical procedure to detect the real and fake characteristics of milk fat using reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography combined with chemometric method. The proposed procedure is an effective tool to detect and warn market management agencies, consumers and related parties about the real and fake characteristics of dairy products.

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Two dairy research students won first prize in national student science and technology research

Sharing with VietNamNet, Linh Da - Ngoc Quy, the owner of the study, said that when studying the subject of food quality control and safety, students were assigned to learn about quality control of milk and dairy products.

During the research, the two students realized that the price of dairy products is very high and uneven for the same group of products. “According to the group's survey, the price of cheese made from cow's milk on the market fluctuates widely, from tens to hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, to evaluate the quality of these products, consumers can only evaluate through some information about the content of basic ingredients in the product such as fat, protein, calories. From there, the group asked the question, so what makes dairy products have such different prices?" - the students said.

Da and Quy also said that currently, the state has national standards for raw fresh milk, however, these regulations mainly refer to the content of groups of substances in the product without any regulations on the quality of these groups of substances in the product.

They have been nurturing the idea of ​​finding a new tool to detect the real and fake properties of milk fat to protect the interests of consumers and genuine milk producers. The idea became stronger after Da and Quy studied in depth the composition of fatty acids in milk fat and learned about “chemometrics” from Dr. Nguyen Van Anh, from the school’s Food Technology Department, who is also the two students’ instructor.

Linh Da said that the group realized that the science of chemometrics has been receiving attention from researchers, especially in the application of studying the authenticity of food and pharmaceutical products.

With the advantage of mathematical tools in chemometrics, the combination of analysis of data obtained from experiments and chemometrics creates an effective tool in solving problems of classification as well as multivariate regression.

After reading many related articles and research works, Linh Da and Ngoc Quy found that one of the popular approaches to detect the presence of foreign fats in milk fat that has been studied is to analyze the composition of fatty acids, triglycerides and other trace elements in milk fat.

From the above analysis, when combining the results of analyzing the triglyceride and fatty acid composition in milk fat samples with chemometrics, it will provide researchers with useful information in the problem of analyzing the authenticity of milk fat samples.

The two students developed a simple and rapid analytical procedure to detect the authenticity of milk fat using reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography combined with chemometric methods.

“The proposed process is an effective tool to detect and warn market management agencies, consumers and relevant parties about the authenticity of dairy products,” Linh Da said.

Research published in ISI indexed journal, group Q1

From the main results of the topic, the research team successfully published the article Novel approach for determination of milk fat adulteration with non-milk fat by RP-HPLC. The article was published in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis under the ISI category, group Q1.

Ngoc Quy said that this research can be applied to all types of dairy products (containing milk fat). Because milk fat is the main ingredient and always appears and creates the characteristic flavor in dairy products.

Therefore, when replacing ingredients in dairy products with other ingredients, the content and composition of milk fat will change, then the proposed process will detect and warn market management agencies, consumers and related parties.

Thus, this will be a powerful and useful tool in the Vietnamese dairy industry. In particular, this is a growing and developing industry, processing technologies are developing day by day. In the future, with the diversity of dairy products, this will be an essential tool.

However, when starting the research, Linh Da and Ngoc Quy's group also encountered many difficulties such as the new approach, so the process of building a process encountered many difficulties from researching the techniques used in sample processing, running chromatography, processing the obtained chromatograms and processing the chemometric input, which took a lot of time and money.

“To conduct the analysis, the group had to arrange time between going to the lab and studying in class, trying to apply the knowledge learned in the classroom to solve problems that arose during the experiment,” Ngoc Quy said.

Ngoc Quy also said that because the process used modern analytical methods, accessing machinery was initially difficult. In addition, with the use of modern analytical methods, the chemicals and solvents used must be very pure, so the cost is high. However, with the support of the school and instructors, the group gradually overcame and completed the initial steps of the research content.

Ngoc Quy also acknowledged that the domestic dairy industry is also in the development stage. The cheese products currently on the market are mainly imported products. Therefore, finding typical samples and ensuring representation of the group of analytes is quite laborious and costly.

To complete the research, the two students collaborated with colleagues in the Russian Federation in the process of sampling and conducting control experiments. It took the research team 2 years to come up with a process to determine the authenticity of milk fat.

Dr. Nguyen Van Anh, Faculty of Food Technology, Ho Chi Minh City University of Industry and Trade, acknowledged that Linh Da and Ngoc Quy are hard-working, dynamic students with good self-study ability. The research topic is the process of analyzing the authenticity of dairy products. According to Dr. Van Anh, this is a group of products with high nutritional value and high price, so there is a high risk of being replaced by cheaper ingredients. Therefore, the topic has high applicability.

The method uses HPLC with the common detector RID, which is very suitable for laboratory conditions in Vietnam. On the other hand, the process can be applied to most dairy products because dairy products all contain a certain amount of milk fat.

At the same time, milk fat is the component that creates the flavor and structure of the product, so the replacement of any milk fat with a foreign fat will be detectable by the process.

Therefore, the scope of application of the method is wide and can be extended to products other than butter and cheese such as milk powder...

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