Food Adulteration

Food adulteration is a fairly common activity that is mostly used to reduce food production costs. In addition to toxicologically insignificant cases of adulteration such as diluting alcoholic beverages with water, there are examples of three compounds being added to various foods. This chapter describes some notorious cases of fatal food poisoning caused by adulteration of food. The selected adulterants were melamine and metabolites in milk and dairy products, formic acid in fish, anisatin in herbal teas. Also, toxic oil syndrome and epidemic dropsy caused by consuming of butter or ghee (clarified butter) prepared with mustard oil adulterated with argemone oil can be examples of fatal adulteration of foods.