Quantitative determination of artificial sweeteners and sucrose in energy drinks and mango juice available in Dhaka city by UV-Spectrophotometric method

Abstract

Energy dinks and mango juice are popular beverages. Apart from the natural ingredients and some additives present in these drinks, sugar is an important component of both. It has been established that other than providing sweetness, sugars are potent to bring about health consequences to its consumers. Sweeteners, both artificial (aspartame, cyclamate and saccharin) and natural (sucrose) were, our center of interest. The aim of this study was to determine the presence and if present then the levels of these sweeteners in energy drinks and mango juice. Simple spectrophotometric methods were used to determine the concentration of the mentioned sugars. For this purpose, a total of 42 samples of 7 different brands were collected from different locations of the Dhaka city, Bangladesh. The methods were found to be linear over the concentration range of 10-26 μg/ml (r2= 0.9989), 137-320 μg/ml (r2= 0.9891), 2.5-24 μg/ml (r2= 0.9915) and 2354-2784 μg/ml (r2= 0.9985) for aspartame, cyclamate, saccharin and sucrose, respectively. Mango juice contained relatively lower amount of saccharin compared to energy drinks. In case of aspartame, one brand of energy drinks had the least amount. Moreover, both energy drinks and mango juice had a similar content of cyclamate but one brand of mango juice had a relatively low content of cyclamate.