Moisture content prediction of porcine meat by bioelectrical impedance spectroscopy

Moisture content is one of the most important elements influencing the quality of porcine meat. However, in recent years, illegally water-injected meat has been discovered repeatedly in the Chinese market. It is well known that high moisture content allows microbes to multiply easily, which can affect people's health and causes major problems for the meat storage and processing industry. This research developed a rapid, low-cost method for measuring moisture content in porcine meat using bioelectrical impedance spectroscopy. Forty-four pieces of porcine longissimus dorsi muscle (LDM) were evaluated with a four-terminal electrode portable bioimpedance spectroscopy system. The samples were divided into a training set and a test set. Thirty samples were selected to be the training set to establish the model for the experiment. The results show good correlation (coefficient of determination R-2 = 0.802) between the impedance parameters and the moisture content value determined by standard chemical methods. Based on the model established using a linear prediction equation, we calculated the moisture content for the test set samples. Promising results were obtained for moisture content prediction of the samples, with R-2 = 0.879 for the test set. The method is thus shown to be feasible for moisture content prediction in porcine LDM, and is potentially useful for assessment and discrimination of meat quality. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.