Harnessing the role of analytical techniques in analysis of adulterants in dietary supplements

Dietary supplements (DS) are becoming more and more popular to meet nutritional demands for a variety of reasons, including the widespread belief of being safe. However, a current trend shows an upsurge in the deliberate adulteration of DS with synthetic medications, which has the potential to have major harmful side effects. It has been observed that DS adulteration includes a remarkable number of synthetic medicines and their analogues. This review discusses the various types of synthetic medications that were found to be contaminated in DS. The primary objective of this review is to highlight analytical techniques for identifying adulterants in DS. Different types of techniques like spectroscopy, chromatography and hyphenated techniques are used for the determination of different types of adulterants in DS. Other techniques like the immunoassay method, electrophoretic method and ion mobility spectrometry are also used in the determination of adulterants.