Advances in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy for Food Authenticity Testing

Any foodstuff is a complex matrix including many compounds, ranging widely in concentration, with different chemical structures and physicochemical properties, which originate from biological raw material and/or are produced during treatment, storage, etc. Therefore an exhaustive food characterization, important to assure its quality and authenticity, usually needs different and complementary analytical techniques to be used. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is not only a robust quantitative analytical technique, it also has proper tools for identification of compounds even in the absence of standards. One of the main advantages of NMR is that it does not require complicated sample preparation or separation of components prior to the actual analysis, and the determination of very different chemical species can be performed in a single experiment. In this chapter some important aspects of NMR methodologies are reported together with relevant examples of NMR applications in authenticity confirmation.