Veterinary drugs containing antimicrobial agents are often administered to livestock to treat or prevent disease and, at low levels, to promote growth in food-producing animals. Government agencies have discovered that some companies are abusing the use of these drugs, by administering them at higher than recommended levels to promote faster growth. This practice results in unwanted drug residues in meat and meat products eaten by humans. Sulfonamides are one class of antimicrobial agent used for that purpose. This AN shows that ASE can extract sulfonamides from meat and baby food with meat.

The U.S. Nutritional Labeling and Education Act of 1990 requires that food products carry labels listing the content of saturated and unsaturated fats. Accurate determination of fat in certain foods is difficult due to the binding or entrapment of the fat by the matrix. Accelerated Solvent Extraction (ASE) is a new automated extraction technique that can significantly reduce extraction time and solvent consumption and yields equivalent results, without requiring a pretreatment step. In this application note, fat is extracted from infant formulas by ASE without aggressive pretreatments.

This application note shows an ion chromatography (IC) determination of chloride in 19 SPIFAN (AOAC Stakeholder Panel on Infant Formula and Adult Nutritionals) matrices. The results show that the method fulfills the SPIFAN standard method performance requirements (SMPRs). Repeatability, recovery, linearity, limit of detection, and limit of quantification were determined according to the chloride AOAC SMPR4 and AOAC Single Lab Validation guidelines. An ICS-6000 can be used for this application.

Vitamin D, including vitamin D2 and D3 (Figure 1), is essential to calcium absorption and bone health. Current studies suggest vitamin D could help prevent a wide range of disorders. Although vitamin D can be synthesized by the human body from exposure to sunlight, fortification in some dietary sources becomes necessary. We describe an easy and comprehensive LC-MS/MS method using a Transcend TLX-1 system powered by Thermo Scientific TurboFlow technology to measure vitamin D levels in infant formula. TurboFlow technology eliminates most traditional sample preparation steps.

2,2-bis(4-hydroxyphenyl) propane, commonly known as Bisphenol A (BPA), is one of the primary chemicals used to make plastics. It is also heavily used in the production of various types of food and drink containers. Because BPA has been known to leach from the plastic lining of metal canned food, the potential risks of exposure to BPA have been a great concern over the past few years. We describe a six-minute LC-MS/MS method using automated sample preparation for the assay of BPA in canned infant formula powder by negative ion APCI using a deuterated internal standard (BPA-d16).