Knowing food quality at home before consumption is very crucial for your health. It calls for finding out the exact ingredients that make the food and ensuring they are in the required measure. Foods may be adulterated or contaminated with toxic substances. These substances can make you sick and unhealthy.
Contamination and adulteration both refer to adding foreign substances in the food. Nonetheless, they don’t mean the same thing. Contamination refers to the unintentional addition of foreign substances in food. And adulteration means an intentional adding of evil substance on the food.
While food manufacturers make and process food in the right quantity and quality, there are some kinds of food that, when you buy, don’t have the same rate as it was processed. For example, adulteration –which involves removing the original quality ingredient. It is a kind of food dilution. When this occurs, the food is no longer safe and can cause some serious health threats. Therefore it is crucial to know the quality of food before consumption.
How to test food quality before consumption
The primary way to know if something is wrong with your food is by use of your senses. An example is when you see a frizzy fruit, it is a sign of spoilage. In the same way, you can sense a canned product is spoiled if it is not in proper shape. You can often use your sense organs to notice adulterants in the food just by examining the condition of the food.
Sometimes it is not easy to identify the contaminants or the adulterants so quickly. On the outward appearance, the food might look so good to the eyes, but surprisingly, it has a foreign substance that makes it unhealthy for consumption. In such cases, you need some form of analysis to know if the food is healthy.
Food analysis can be done at home or in the school lab. The basics you can perform at home is, for example, identifying the addition of water in milk, the addition of colors in sugar, or beverages. You can conduct a simple analysis to determine any form of adulterant in the food.
Need for intermediate food tests
To check for food quality, you may need to go ahead and do an intermediate food test. Unlike the basic food test that can only tell the presence and absence, intermediate tests can tell you the number of adulterants. It is an excellent way to go; however, it requires advanced skills and instruments.
An example of an intermediate food test is the Mobile Food Testing Laboratory. It has necessary test equipment that helps find the level of adulteration in milk and other dairy products. They can do 23 food tests for you.
Need for advanced food tests
Sometimes food may be tempered within low quantity. This is the time when you need to conduct advanced tests. Unlike the intermediate and basic tests, the advance test can identify a specific amount of adulterants in the food. However, low the number of pollutants might be on your food; it is prudent to know and eliminate it as it can cause health risks.
Advanced tests can be done only by professional technicians in advanced laboratories. For instance, if you want to know the smallest details of natural honey ingredients, you can get the information from the labs.
But for the majority, the basic test is the way to go as you can perform it at home and get fair results. Food Safety Magic Box comes handy as the best food testing kit for the home you can use to determine food quality before consumption.
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