Simultaneous determination of monosaccharides, disaccharides, oligosaccharides and sugar alcohols in foods by high performance liquid chromatography with evaporative light-scattering detection

A simple and efficient method was established based on high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to separate and detect thirteen analytes of monosaccharides, disaccharides, oligosaccharides and sugar alcohols (xylose, fructose, glucose, sucrose, maltose, lactose, 1-kestose, nystose, 1F-fructofuranosyl nystose, erythritol, mannitol, xylitol, maltitol) in foods. The separation was performed on an NH2 column with the gradient elution of acetonitrile-water as the mobile phases. The analytes were detected by an evaporative light-scattering detector (ELSD). All the thirteen sugars had good linearities within 0.1 - 5 g/L with the correlation coefficients between 0.9901 - 0.9996. The limits of detection (LOD) were all less than 0.1 g/L. The precisions of the method expressed as RSDs were in the range of 2.69% -7.21%. The recoveries of the thirteen analytes spiked in real samples ranged from 96.1% to 105.2%. This method was applied to the actual sample testings and the results showed the food labels were greatly different from the actual compositions.