Towards the Substitution of Food Additives through Supercritical Technology. Extraction and Chemical Characterization of Vegetal Extracts

1.Abstract Food additives play an important role in today's complex food supply, nevertheless, they represent one of the most misunderstood topic in food safety that raises consumer's concern. Food additives are intentionally added to food in order to produce a desired positive effect, although their level has to be maintained within regulated limits. At present, there is an enormous interest in the development of novel class of food-additives based on substances extracted from natural sources by using environmentally friendly extraction processes, such as supercritical fluid extraction (SFE). In the present work, several supercritical conditions have been tested to obtain natural food ingredients from natural sources such as plants, fruits, etc, with the scope of substituting some currently used chemicals, which are subject to regulation restriction and might be harmful for human health. The extracts have been fully characterized from the chemical and biochemical point of view, and attempts have been made to understand their mechanism of action. Therefore, several chromatographic methods have been developed based on gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and high performance liquid chromatography coupled with diode-array detection (HPLC-DAD) to study the complex profile of the obtained extracts. New analytical methods for profiling the compounds responsible of the antioxidant activity have been developed allowing the simultaneous determination of water soluble vitamins (ascorbic acid, thiamine, folic, pyridoxine, nicotinamide, cobalamine), fat soluble vitamins (α-tocopherol, retinol acetate, cholecalciferol), phenolic compounds (phenolic acids, cinnamic acids, flavanones, isoflavones, anthocyanins), carotenoids (β-carotene and lutein) and chlorophylls in a single run.