Two analytical approaches to the evaluation of chondroitin sulfate in european food supplements.

The amount and quality of CS from several Czech Republic food supplement/nutraceutical preparations was determined. In order to quantify CS, two different analytical approaches were applied after their validation [see Volpi, N. & Maccari, F. (2008) Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of chondroitin sulfate in dietary supplements. Food Anal. Chem., 1, 195-204], specific and sensitive agarose-gel electrophoresis and SAX-HPLC determination of the constituent disaccharides after treatment with specific chondroitin lyases.The CS content in food supplement products were found to conform to the label specifications only in four of the ten analyzed samples. Four of the food supplement preparations were found to contain approx. 0-1% CS in comparison with 47, 17, 12 and 6% declared on the label. Two products were found to have approx. 30-45% of the declared CS, and one preparation was found to contain approx. 2% hyaluronic acid. SAX-HPLC separation of unsaturated disaccharides for the nutraceutical CS was also used to evaluate its quality and the possible origin. The CS contained in eight food supplements resulted to be of bovine or porcine origin, one from cartilagineous fishes and in one case it was not possible to determine the origin due to a very low CS content.On the basis of these analytical results, the quality of these ten Czech Republic food supplement formulations is poor and strict regulations for quality control should be mandatory in order to guarantee the manufacture of high quality products. Furthermore, specific and accurate analytical procedures should be enforced for the control of high quality products and applied by quality control laboratories to confirm the purity and label claim of CS in raw materials and nutraceuticals