The Role of Capillary Electrophoresis to Guarantee the Quality and Safety of Dietary Supplements

At present, dietary supplements are commercially available products, globally consumed as an addition to the usual diet. Considering that dietary supplements are a source of nutrients, they are widely utilized to improve human health and prevent various diseases; therefore they are expected to be safe. There is still no common definition regarding the role of supplements which cannot be considered functional foods nor drugs. Dietary ingredients in supplements are exempt from food additives or drugs regulations. For this reason, these supplements are marketed without any data on identity, including ingredient information, effectiveness, toxicology and safety. Therefore, efficacy and safety are necessary claims required to preserve consumer health. To face this imperative challenge, sensitive and selective analytical techniques capable of providing a full characterization of the supplements in terms of their components are needed. In the last decades, Capillary Electrophoresis (CE) has shown to be a powerful tool that offers solutions to almost any analytical issue arising in several application fields. Due to its simplicity of operation and versatility, it has become a complementary separation tool to other separation techniques such as gas and liquid chromatography in the analysis of dietary supplements. This chapter aims to give a comprehensive overview of the most important applications of CE for the analysis of dietary supplements in terms of their main key components.