Analysis of artificial sweeteners: development and supervision of methods. Applications to intake evaluations

Chemical control of foodstuffs is carried out as a part of national food control mainly by municipal and some industrial food laboratories.The first aim of the present study was to raise and unify the standard of chemical control in food laboratories using interlaboratory studies.Three reference methods for artificial sweeteners for the Nordic Committee on Food Analysis (NMKL) were developed.The methods were detection of saccharin, cyclamate and dulcin and quantitative determination of cyclamate and saccharin.Collaborative testing is essential in method standardization in order to benefit from the pooled experience of potential users.The problems of organization of a collaborative study were thus considered.In this investigation the performance parameters, mainly the reproducibility relative standard deviations (RSDRs) for the quantitative methods were estimated by the collaborative studies. Collaborative studies on the determination of artificial sweeteners were organized for leading Nordic research laboratories and Finnish municipal food laboratories.The collaborative results of cyclamate analysed with a UVspectrophotometric method were compared with those of saccharin analysed with a high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method.Fewer outliers were detected among the UV spectrophotometric analyses and the RSDRs were lower than in the HPLC method and at the same level as the values expected by the Association of Official Analytical Chemists in the USA.The RSDRs obtained by the municipal laboratories were at the same level as those obtained by the research laboratories.The higher RSDRs with the HPLC method indicate the importance of collaborative studies before adopting new instrumental techniques in the regulatory analytical work of food laboratories.As an application of the developed reference methods, saccharin and cyclamate were analysed for intake evaluations of artificial sweeteners from foods mainly produced in Finland during the period 1979--1985.The intakes evaluated were referred to the acceptable daily intakes for children and adults.In the beginning of the 1980's the intakes of saccharin and cyclamate from soft drinks and from desserts served in hospitals exceeded or were close to the values accepted as maximum daily intakes for children.The use of artificial sweeteners has been restricted in the current food legislation