Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) are a class of heterogeneous compounds formed by the Maillard reaction between reducing sugars and free amino groups of proteins. Studies have found that dietary AGEs can be accumulated in the body, causing hazardous effects on human health. Therefore it is necessary to carry out detection and analysis of typical AGEs in foods. Currently, due to the wide variety and complex structure of dietary AGEs, there is a lack of general analytical methods for their detection. Therefore, this paper presents a review of the structure and types of dietary AGEs, their relationship with human health, and their state-of-the-art detection technologies. A specific focus is put on the immunoassays and instrumental methods used for the detection of dietary AGEs as well as their characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages. Furthermore, this paper provides an outlook on the future research directions in this field. We expect that this review will provide references for the development of new methods for the detection of dietary AGEs and the establishment of related research systems.

A method was developed for the simultaneous determination of seven Maillard reaction products (MRPs), namely N^ε-(carboxymethyl)-lysine (CML), N^ε-(carboxyethyl)-lysine (CEL), methyglyoxal-derived hydroimidazolones (MG-H1, MG-H2 and MG-H3), glyoxal-derived hydroimidazolone (G-H1) and furosine in prepackaged foods by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-triple quadrupole-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-QqQ-MS/MS). The chromatographic separation was performed on a Kinetex C₁₈ column and quantification was performed in the multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode. The recoveries of the method ranged from 88.4% to 111.3% with relative standard deviations (RSDs) less than 9% in terms of precision, and the limit of detection and the limit of quantification were 2.1–14.2 and 7.4–41.2 ng/mL, respectively. The developed method was applied to 134 typical prepackaged foods, and the obtained data was analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA) and correlation analysis (CA). The results showed that CML, MG-H1/3, MG-H2 and G-H1 were the major MRPs in prepackaged foods, and they had significant positive correlations with each other and with protein, fat and total sugar contents. This method shows acceptable linearity, accuracy and precision and is suitable for the rapid determination of multiple MRPs in prepackaged foods.