Development of non-destructive methods for the assessment of authenticity of sports whey protein supplements

In the category of sports supplements, whey protein powder is one of the popular supplements for muscle building applications. Therefore, verification of the sport supplements as authentic products has become a universal concern. This work aimed to propose vibrational spectroscopy including near infrared (NIR) and infrared (IR) as rapid and non-destructive testing tools for the detection and quantification of maltodextrin, milk powder and milk whey powder in whey protein supplements. Initially, principal component analysis was applied to data for pattern recognition and the results displayed a fine pattern of discrimination. Partial least square discrimination analysis (PLS-DA) and K-nearest neighbours (KNN) were exploited as supervised method modelling classification. This process was done in order to respond to two vital questions whether the sample is adulterated or not and what is the kind of adulteration. PLS-DA showed better classification results rather than KNN according to the figure of merits of the model. Partial least square regression (PLSR) was employed on pre-treated spectra to quantify the amount of adulteration in sport whey supplements. Eventually, it seems vibrational spectroscopy could be implemented as a simple, and low-cost analysis method for the detection and quantification of mentioned adulterants in whey protein supplements.