Determination of Xylitol, D-sorbitol and D-mannitol in food by anion-exchange chromatography with pulsed amperometric detection

An anion-exchange chromatography (IC) with pulsed amperometric detection of xylitol, D-sorbitol and n-mannitol in food was developed. These alcoholic sugars extracted with 80% ethanol from food were diluted 1000 times with water as IC samples. The detection limit of each standard sugar alcohol was 0.025 ppm (25 ppm in food). The sensitivity of this method was about 1000 and 30 times higher than those of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with refractive index (RI) detection and gas chromatography (GC) with flame-ionization (FID) detection, respectively. Furthermore the sample treatment is simple compared with other methods. The recoveries of xylitol, D-sorbitoI and D-mannitol added in foods were 77.8-104.0%.