Dietary supplements are legally considered foods despite frequently including
medicinal plants as ingredients. Currently, the consumption of herbal dietary
supplements, also known as plant food supplements (PFS), is increasing worldwide
and some raw botanicals, highly demanded due to their popularity,
extensive use, and/orwell-established pharmacological effects, have been attaining
high prices in the international markets. Therefore, botanical adulteration
for profit increase can occur along the whole PFS industry chain, from raw
botanicals to plant extracts, until final PFS. Besides the substitution of highvalue
species, unintentional mislabeling can happen in morphologically similar
species. Both cases represent a health risk for consumers, prompting the development
of numerous works to access botanical adulterations in PFS. Among
different approaches proposed for this purpose, mass spectrometry (MS)-based
techniques have often been reported as the most promising, particularly when
hyphenated with chromatographic techniques. Thus, this review aims at describing
an overview of the developments in this field, focusing on the applications
of MS-based techniques to targeted and untargeted analysis to detect botanical
adulterations in plant materials, extracts, and PFS.
Dietary supplements are legally considered foods despite frequently including medicinal plants as ingredients. Currently, the consumption of herbal dietary supplements, also known as plant food supplements (PFS), is increasing worldwide and some raw botanicals, highly demanded due to their popularity, extensive use, and/or well-established pharmacological effects, have been attaining high prices in the international markets. Therefore, botanical adulteration for profit increase can occur along the whole PFS industry chain, from raw botanicals to plant extracts, until final PFS. Besides the substitution of high-value species, unintentional mislabeling can happen in morphologically similar species. Both cases represent a health risk for consumers, prompting the development of numerous works to access botanical adulterations in PFS. Among different approaches proposed for this purpose, mass spectrometry (MS)-based techniques have often been reported as the most promising, particularly when hyphenated with chromatographic techniques. Thus, this review aims at describing an overview of the developments in this field, focusing on the applications of MS-based techniques to targeted and untargeted analysis to detect botanical adulterations in plant materials, extracts, and PFS.
The authors acknowledge the support of FCT (Fundação
para a Ciência e Tecnologia) through the project
“POIROT: novel methods and approaches for detecting
the illegal addition of Pharmaceutical drugs and
bOtanIcal adulteRatiOn in planT food supplements”
(PTDC/SAU-PUB/3803/2021); the strategic funding
of CIMO (UIDB/00690/2020|UIDP/00690/2020),
SusTEC (LA/P/0007/2020), and REQUIMTE
(UIDB/50006/2020|UIDP/50006/2020) from FCT/MCTES
(PIDDAC); and the European Union (EU) through
European Regional Development Fund with the project
Healthy&ValorFood (FEDER funds through NORTE-01-
0145-FEDER-000052). L. Grazina is grateful to FCT grants
(SFRH/BD/132462/2017 and COVID/BD/152444/2022)
financed by POPH-QREN (subsidized by FSE and
MCTES). I. Mafra thanks FCT for funding through
the Individual Call to Scientific Employment Stimulus
(2021.03670.CEECIND/CP1662/CT0011). This work was
also supported by the project SYSTEMIC under the
ERA-NET ERA-HDHL (no. 696295).
