The goal of this project was to analyze cinnamon dietary supplements and cooking spices to determine the concentration of cinnamaldehyde and compare it to the cost. Thirteen different samples were analyzed: 7 dietary supplement capsule brands (including 3 “organic”), 2 dietary supplement tablet brands, and 4 cooking spice brands (including 1 “organic”). Most of the dietary supplements were cinn. verum or cinn. burmanii species; the cooking spices did not identify the constituent cinnamon species. In order to determine the concentrations of cinnamaldehyde in each sample, an extraction method from a previous study was used. Most of the cinnamon samples that were tested were already finely ground, except for the cinnamon extract tablets that were finely crushed before use. Then 0.1 g of ground cinnamon was mixed with 10 mL of methanol using sonication or vortex mixing for 15 min. The liquid extract was then filtered through a 0.45 μm PTFE syringe filter. The filtered sample was diluted 1:10 with a mixture of 35/30/35 Water/ACN/MeOH; this mixture was also used as the mobile phase during separation. Extractions were performed in triplicate. From the diluted samples, 20 μL was injected into a High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) instrument. Each sample was run for 12 minutes (isocratic elution) through an Inertsil ODS-3V column (15 cm x 4.6 mm, 5 μm particle size) with a flow rate of 1 mL/min. The UV-VIS absorbance detector was set at 221 nm. The cinnamaldehyde peak eluted at approximately 4.5 minutes, as confirmed with an analytical standard. A calibration curve was constructed using dilute cinnamaldehyde standards. The range of the calibration curve was from 0.5 μg/mL to 100 μg/mL and showed excellent linearity (R2 = 0.9969). The calibration curve was used to convert the peak areas from the cinnamon samples into concentrations of cinnamaldehyde. Results showed that cinnamon spices used for cooking were generally less expensive while containing comparable amounts of cinnamaldehyde to the dietary supplements studied, approximately 2% by mass. Tablet supplements had significantly less cinnamaldehyde (&lt; 0.5% by mass) than the capsule supplements. While there was variation in the amount of cinnamaldehyde found for different supplement brands, the brands containing cinn. verum were generally more potent than the cinnamon cassia, burmanii, and wilsonii species studied.

Quantification of cinnamaldehyde in dietary supplements and cooking spices

256th National Meeting (2018)

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