Quantitative analysis of artificial sweeteners in soft drink samples

Abstract

Carbonated drinks are the biggest soft drinks sector around the globe and have grown significantly over the last few decades. It has become part of the urban lifestyle and is consumed by people regardless of age, religion, gender, race or culture. With this increasing popularity came the use of synthetic sweeteners, also known as Non-nutritive sweeteners (NAS), which are low caloric substances used to replace sugar or corn syrup and other caloric ones. Higher concentration of some of these sweeteners leads to various side-effects such as physical weakness, poor night vision, insomnia, mental depression, anxiety, feeling aggressive, weight gain and so on. Hence, the detection of these sweeteners is important to ensure consistency in product quality. In this study, a simple, selective, precise and low-cost procedure using the spectrophotometric method was performed to determine the concentration of three artificial (aspartame, saccharin, cyclamate) and one natural sweetener (sucrose) in eight brands of regularly consumed soft drinks. For this purpose, 12 samples from each brand were analyzed, collected from different supermarkets in Dhaka. Artificial sweeteners were found in all analyzed products. Mean concentration of aspartame, saccharine, cyclamate and sucrose were found to lie in the range between 11-104, 1-9, 45-165 and 1800-2000 μg/ml, respectively. The correlation coefficient of the calibration curve was better than 0.99 (n> 6). The method can be validated with respect to sensitivity, linearity range, reproducibility, repeatability, recovery, and robustness, except for saccharine which showed higher %RSD.