Recent Procedures For Organic And Inorganic Toxics Extraction In Honey, Propolis, And Royal Jelly: A Review

In recent years, several studies have been conducted on functional foods, which show having nutritional properties that can play a beneficial effect on one or more biological functions. Honey, Royal Jelly, and Propolis are a clear example, and it is essential to develop studies focused on the major contamination sources of these products. These include firstly the bees considered an important environmental pollution index. They draw raw materials directly from the environment, and a transfer of organic and inorganic toxic compounds in their products is possible. Furthermore, the contaminants such as pesticides, acaricides, volatile residues, antibiotics, heavy metals, and radioactive isotopes are often present. To date, the apiculture products contamination has become a public health problem due to their high consumption. Given the complexity of the matrices (honey, propolis, and royal jelly), major problems in these determinations is the pre-analytical phase where the sample were treated with several extraction techniques or acidic digestion in order to clean up and improve (in terms of sensitivity and selectivity) quantitative analyses. Over the years, analytical techniques developed for the determination of these toxics have evolved giving better results using lower amounts of extractions solvents, and projecting the work towards a new concept of analytical chemistry that is in agreement with the "green chemistry" guidelines, in order to eliminate or attenuate the production of harmful substances caused by chemical processes. This review is focused on novel extraction procedures used to treat these matrices why particular attention to “green chemistry” approach used for organic and inorganic toxics.