ABSTRACT
In food control, analysis of alcohols includes a specic group of components that include the so-called low-molecular-weight alcohols (i.e., methanol and ethanol), higher aliphatic alcohols, or higher molecular-weight alcohols (i.e., propanol, butanol, pentanol, and hexanol and their corresponding isomers). In this last group, some of the so-called higher alcohols are included, that is, those containing from 4 to 10 atoms of carbon, although C8, C9, and C10 alcohols also belong to the fatty alcohols group, that is, those in which the carbon skeleton contains from 8 to 20 atoms of carbon. All these alcohols have one hydroxyl moiety (monohydric alcohols), but in foods, dihydric alcohols and trihydric alcohols can also be found. Other kinds of alcohols
are sugar alcohols or polyols. Sugar alcohols have the general formula H(HCHO)n+1H. They are hydrogenated form of carbohydrates, whose carbonyl group has been reduced to an alcohol group. The most abundant compounds in foods are aliphatic alcohols, but there are other sorts of compounds in smaller quantities such as cycloaliphatic and aromatic alcohols, among them, complex alcohols such as phenols, terpenic mono-and dialcohol, as, for example, sterols and vitamin E. Even though these latter compounds have at least one alcohol group, they have chemical properties quite different to other typical alcohols, and for that reason, they will not be treated in this chapter.
