Screening of plant food supplements for fraud concerning the presence of medicinal or regulated plants based on multi-dimensional chromatographic fingerprints

The presentation gives an overview of the national project “PF-Fraud” focused on the detection and identification of forbidden and regulated plants in herbal preparations. During the project an approach was developed based on chromatographic fingerprinting, mass spectrometry and chemometrics to detect four regulated plants with slimming properties: Ilex Paraguariensis, Hoodia Gordonii, Garcinia Cambogia, Aristolochia Fanghi.

In a first step an approach was developed recording chromatograms at different UV wavelength, followed by an approach based on mass spectrometry and the combination of both. Finally the mass spectrometric approach was chosen to conduct a small market study comprising 21 samples purchased on the Belgian regular market and 24 from irregular sources.

For the regular market one sample was found not to contain Ilex Paraguariensis, although declared and 3 samples were found to contain undeclared Aristolochia Fanghi. For the irregular sources 12 samples contained undeclared Ilex Paraguariensis and 4 Aristolochia Fanghi.

These results show the feasibility of the approach, though modelling errors should be taken into account and the “positive” samples should be confirmed by a complementary technique like for example next generation sequencing.