A critical examination of some experimental variables in the 2-thiobarbituric acid (TBA) test for lipid oxidation in meat products

Abstract

By comparison of various procedures for the determination of TBARS (2-thiobarbituric-acid-reactive substances) in non-cured meat samples, it was found that a direct extraction procedure with trichloroacetic acid gave significantly higher reaction yields than a rapid Kjeltec steam distillation procedure (50 ml distillate in 2.5 min). When optimizing the distillation procedure with regard to distillation principle (heating by thermal conductivity or steam injection) and rate, the reaction yield was more affected by changes in distillation principle than by changes in distillation rate. Simple distillation (conduction heating) yielded significantly higher TBA values than steam distillation at the same distillation rate. The reproducibility of the distillation procedure was found to be about 5–10 times poorer than of the extraction procedure and, because of the high reaction yields and robustness of the extraction procedure, the use of the extraction procedure is recommended with food matrices such as non-cured meat samples with less than 14–18% fat and no artificial colorants.