A TENTATIVE MEASUREMENT OF BROWN PIGMENTS IN VARIOUS PROCESSED FOODS

A tentative method for measuring brown pigment in food was proposed an d applied to 25 items of commercial browned foods. The principle was b ased on the assumption that any brown pigment with general absorption in the visible wave-length spectrum is quantitatively equivalent to me lanoidin prepared from a model system of the Maillard reaction. The sp ectral curve for general absorption was represented by the equation dE /d lambda = -kE (E, absorbance; lambda = wave length; k = constant > 0 ), of which the value k was found to correlate with the molecular weig ht and the molar extinction coefficient and to serve as an empirical p arameter for the measurement of brown substances in different foods.