Validation of a Simple and Robust Liebermann–Burchard Colorimetric Method for the Assay of Cholesterol in Selected Milk Products in Ghana

Cholesterol plays a key role in the synthesis of bile acids and steroid hormones in the human body. However, excessively high levels are usually implicated in cardiovascular diseases. For this reason, it is essential to monitor exposure to high levels of it in products meant for human consumption, and this calls for the need to develop analytical methods to detect them. e use of Liebermann– Burchard reaction in this study has been explored to develop a simple, reliable, and robust quantitative colorimetric method to assay cholesterol, and hence provide a good alternative to chromatographic methods. e developed method was validated and used to determine the contents of cholesterol in selected dairy products on the Kumasi Metropolis market. e method demonstrated a good linearity (2 = 0.996) over concentration range of 0.01–0.08mg/ml. It was also shown to be and robust. e limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) were determined to be 0.00430mg/ml and 0.01304mg/ml, respectively. Ten selected brands of canned milk (B1–B5) and fresh yoghurt products (A1–A5) were then assayed using the developed method. e results showed that three products from each category had cholesterol contents above the allowable content of 5mg/100 g in dairy products. study thus has proposed a simple colorimetric method that can be adopted by dairy products manufacturing facilities to rapidly determine cholesterol contents during manufacturing in order to monitor the safe consumption of their products, and eliminate or minimize possible future health hazards.