Determining Carbohydrates in Essential and Non-essential Foodstuffs using Ion Chromatography

This article describes a straightforward ion chromatographic method that uses isocratic elution and pulsed amperometric detection (PAD) to sensitively determine water-soluble polyols and sugar alcohols as well as mono-, di- and oligosaccharides in essential and non-essential foodstuffs. While carbohydrate determination of most foodstuffs requires only minimal sample preparation such as dilution and filtration, samples with interfering matrices such as protein-containing dairy products have to be dialysed before injection.