A Review Paper on Food Adulteration

Abstract

Food is essential for our survival, and we expect it to be pure, safe, and nutritious. However, in today’s world, food adulteration has become a serious problem. Adulteration means adding harmful or low-quality substances to food, which reduces its quality and can even harm our health. From milk and spices to oils and sweets, many everyday food items are often mixed with chemicals, colors, or cheaper ingredients. This not only cheats consumers but also poses major health risks. Understanding food adulteration, its types, causes, and prevention is important to ensure the food we eat is safe and healthy.

Introduction

Food adulteration is a long-standing and widespread problem that threatens public health, consumer trust, and fair trade. It involves degrading food quality by adding inferior or harmful substances, removing valuable components, or misrepresenting products. Adulteration occurs across the entire food chain and is mainly driven by economic gain, though it can also happen unintentionally due to poor hygiene, contamination, or lack of awareness.

Adulteration affects almost all food commodities globally and can cause serious health problems ranging from digestive issues and allergies to organ damage and long-term diseases. While advanced laboratory techniques for detection are accurate, they are expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, there is a strong need for simple, quick screening tests that consumers can perform at home to identify common adulterants.

The text reviews common types of adulteration—intentional, unintentional, and concealment—and provides everyday examples such as diluted milk, adulterated spices, fake honey, and mixed oils. It also highlights government efforts, such as food safety standards and inspections, alongside household-level tests using basic observations and simple chemicals.

Practical detection methods are demonstrated for paneer, honey, cheese, and turmeric using iodine, tissue paper, and dilute acids to identify adulterants like starch, sugar syrups, chalk powder, and artificial dyes. Overall, the increasing incidence of food adulteration calls for greater consumer awareness, improved detection technologies, and continued research to protect public health and honest producers.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Falguni Bhavsar, Tanish Chavan, Snehal Wavare, Shardul Patil, Omkar Aradhye. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.