Health food with nutritional or physiological effects is suitable for certain people, and it can be used to regulate body functions but not for curing diseases. Therefore, substances with therapeutic functions cannot be included in health food, as they are classified as special food and are specifically regulated. The use of health food has increased worldwide in the last few decades. However, illegal activities such as the manufacture and marketing of fake commodities, false advertising, and fraudulent sales have restricted the sustainable development of the health food industry. In particular, there is much concern regarding health food illegally adulterated with pharmaceuticals and their analogs because of the notable risk to public health. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop accurate and sensitive detection methods for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of such compounds. Many methods have been developed for the determination of adulterants in health food, such as high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), high performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS), direct analysis real-time mass spectrometry (DART-MS), and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). However, in recent years, new features of adulterants in health food have emerged. For example, the chemical compositions of drugs added to health food, including prescription drugs, delisted drugs, drug analogs, and new drugs, are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Furthermore, there has been a change in trend from the addition of large doses of a single component to the addition of small doses of a class of components or multiple components. These pose great challenges to the identification and measurement of such illegal additives. Detection technologies for new drugs and structurally modified analogs are still scarce; hence, newer methods for non-targeted screening are necessary. Fortunately, several structure elucidation techniques have been introduced, including high-resolution time-of-flight (TOF) MS, infrared spectroscopy, as well as 1H and 13C nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry. This study summarizes the types of drugs that may be illegally added in health food according to their pharmacological activities related to the claimed efficacy of health food; advances in detection technologies for illegal drugs; and future development prospects. The overall aim is to provide beneficial reference for the development of standard methods and for the routine monitoring of health food.
Keywords: gas chromatography (GC); health food; illegal drugs; liquid chromatography (LC); mass spectrometry (MS); research progress.