Simultaneous Determination of All Polyphenols in Vegetables, Fruits, and Teas

Polyphenols, which have beneficial effects on health and occur ubiquitously in plant foods, are extremely diverse. We developed a method for simultaneously determining all the polyphenols in foodstuffs, using HPLC and a photodiode array to construct a library comprising retention times, spectra of aglycons, and respective calibration curves for 100 standard chemicals. The food was homogenized in liquid nitrogen, lyophilized, extracted with 90% methanol, and subjected to HPLC without hydrolysis. The recovery was 68-92%, and the variation in reproducibility ranged between 1 and 9%. The HPLC eluted polyphenols with good resolution within 95 min in the following order: simple polyphenols, catechins, anthocyanins,…