Through-package fat determination in commercial samples of mayonnaise and salad dressing using time-domain nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and chemometrics

Although fat is an essential component in the human diet, the consumption of food with high fat content has been the major cause of obesity. Here we are demonstrating that time-domain nuclear magnetic resonance (TD-NMR) decays, obtained by Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG) pulse sequence, can be used to predict the total fat content in sealed packages of commercial food emulsions, such as mayonnaise and salad dressing that may contain more than 50% of fat. The PLS model of the CPMG decays shows high linear correlation (>0.9) and low root mean square errors (RMSE) for cross-validation and validation data. Therefore, this procedure can be used to predict the total fat content in food emulsion after packaging, to detect problems in the manufacturing process or fraud. In addition, the TD-NMR instrument and the proposed methods can also be adapted for using at the end of the food chain (store) to measure the fat content in consumer packaged goods.