Avaliação do teor de corantes artificiais em cereal matinal: validação de metodologia analítica e contribuição para avaliar a exposição de crianças de 2 a 8 anos

Abstract

With the increased consumption of industrialized food, the ingestion of food additives used in the technological processing of this kind of food reveals itself as a threat to the human health, mainly of the child population. The dyes are the additives applied only with the meaning of giving or restoring the color of the foodstuffs, without offering any nutritional value to it. Studies have been demonstrating the occurrences of adverse reactions at short or long term associated with the ingestion of food that have in their composition the artificial dyes. Those reactions range since allergies and behavior alterations to carcinogenicity and mutagenicity. The goal of this study was determinate the concentration of industrialized dyes in matinal cereal, contributing to evaluate the exposure of children between 2 to 8 years old, and also formulate the methodology of determination of artificial dyes on matinal cereal. It was elaborated a questionnaire about the frequency and quantity consumed of matinal cereal by the infants, being the same answered by their responsibles. The ingestion was classified in score and evaluated by the Kruskal-Wallis test, applying as a tool the Microsoft Office Excel 2007 software. After this analysis, it was verified that the children were split in two big groups, being the first with ages between 2 and 5 years old, with consumption of score 1, and the second group with ages between 6 and 8 years old, with consumption of score 2. Concerning the flavor of the consumed cereal, 65% ingest the traditional cereal, 25% the chocolate flavor and 10% the fruits flavor, with only the last two flavors bringing in their composition artificial dyes. The validation was made to the dyes allowed by the legislation of use in matinal cereal, and they are: sunset yellow, allura red AC and brilliant blue. All the process of validation in this research was made under the recommended by Thompson et al. (2002), using the advices present in the INMETRO DOO-CGCRE-08 (2011) document and in IUPAC harmonized guidelines, measuring the following method performance: Limit of detection (LD), limit of quantification (LQ), linearity, selectivity, repeatability, intermediate precision and recovery. The linear range found to Sunset Yellow was 15 to 45 mg/L, to Allura Red AC and Brilliant Blue was 5 to 35 mg/L. The LD and LQ were, respectively 3 mg/L and 6 mg/L for Sunset Yellow and 2 mg/L and 4 mg/L for allura red AC and brilliant blue. The recovery percentage was 82 to 97% for sunset yellow, 82 to 87% for allura red AC and 81 to 86% for brilliant blue. The calculated values for repeatability as standard deviation were 0.455 mg/L for sunset yellow, 0.375 mg/L for allura red AC and 0.542 mg/L for Brilliant Blue. Finally, the measures calculated from Horwitz ratio (RSDexperimental/RSDHorwitz) to the determination of intermediate precision found were 0.393 for Sunset Yellow, 0.090 for allura red AC and 0.040 for brilliant blue. The method showed itself precise, exact, linear in a wide range of concentration and your determination is not influenced by the alimentary matrix for determination by HPLC. Besides, the methodology turns out interesting since there are no official methods for the determination of industrialized dyes in matinal cereal. In a sample, among the analyzed cereals, it was identified tartrazine dye, which is not allowed to be used o this kind of product. In the others, all were according to the legislation, even respecting the IDA established for each dye. It is worth noting that it is only a single kind of artificially colored food consumed by youngsters, however in its daily diet, a child ingest many foods which contain these substances, such as powder juice, many candies, cookies, gelatin, comfit, sodas, what points the need of a further study about the daily consumption of artificial dyes by children. The fact that one sample contains tartrazine, forbidden dye for this kind of food, alert about the necessity of an effective sanitary supervision about the artificially colored products.