Detection and Estimation of Metanil Yellow & Congo Red: Carcinogenic Food Colourants, Present in Different Food Samples

Nowadays adulteration is a social disease which is applied on food to make food more attractive and togain more profit from it. Along with different processed food products, Spices like Turmeric powder, red chillipowder, etc. provides good nutrition to us until they are treated with some foreign colours or organic coloursto make them adulterated, which causes various detrimental effects in physiological system such as heartfailure, liver damage, cancer and many more, if people consume them over a certain period of time. Metanilyellow, Sudan red dye, Congo red are such organic dyes which are used abundantly in different spices andprocessed food products. These dyes are toxic chemicals and could be carcinogenic as well. The presence ofall these components can be detected with chemical experiments. This present research study is focused onthe detection of adulterants present in sample on the basis of pH variation of adulterated food sample fromthe pure one and its estimation by variation of spectrophotometric absorbance with the concentration of theadulterant in the sample. After testing samples with different concentration of adulterants, it has beenobserved that pH of samples is gradually increasing with the increase in concentration of adulterants from 0to 16.66 gm/100gm present in the sample.