ABSTRACT
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is undoubtedly one of the most powerful analytical techniques available today for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of organic (and also inorganic) compounds. During the 1980s, important hardware advances paved the way for the increased use of NMR in the structural characterization of chemical compounds, while the availability of sophisticated software meant that the acquisition and interpretation of NMR spectra was easier, making NMR accessible to a more general scientic audience, a trend that continues strongly today (Spyros and Dais 2012). Since foods are, from a chemical point of view, complex mixtures of organic compounds, NMR is an ideal tool for their analysis, because of its inherent quantitative character (van Duynhoven et al. 2013). NMR signals are directly related to the abundance of chemical compounds in a food matrix; so, it did not take a long time for food scientists to realize that NMR can be used for the compositional analysis of foods in the early 1980s. Furthermore, the NMR spectrum of a compound can be considered its ngerprint; thus, problems such as the identication of illegal or dangerous chemical compounds (e.g., additives, degradation products, toxic substances, etc.) in foods that form the core of quality-control procedures naturally led to the development of suitable NMR methodologies for addressing them. Food degradation, processing, conservation, and cooking are all procedures that alter the chemical composition of foods in a small or big manner, and thus are amenable to analysis by NMR spectroscopy.
