think about what you had for breakfast today. the packaging on any processed food you ate, including cereal, milk,bread and yogurt, has a label that provides you with nutrition information so you can make healthy diet choice. this imformation comes from chemical analysis.
suppose you ate a boiled egg and a banana instead of the cereal and milk. there is no label with nutrition information there, but analytical chemists have rested a sample of eggs and bananas for residues of harmful chemicals so you can be confident that your breakfast is safe to eat.
your toothpaste, too, will have a label that says something like 'active ingredient 0.7% w/w sodium monofluorophosphate'. an analytical chemist would have checked that this amount of active ingredient was correct.
analytical chemists are employed in a range of industries, from food manufacturing to environmental monitoring and foerensic sciences and many more. they use a range of techniques and technologies to determine the identity, quality, and quantity of the chemicals that make up our world.
the composition of consumer goods is of great importance. for example, residues such as dieldrin and DDT have been detected in meat. nutrionists urge us to eat fish on a regular basis to take advantage of the beneficial fatty scids that many fish contain. but fish can also contain heavy metals, such as mercury. goernments have placed restrictions on the amount of pesticides and heavy metals allowed in foods. for example, the acceptable daily intake of DDT is 0.002 milligram per kilogram of body weight per day(0.002mg/kg/day) while that of dieldrin is 0.0001mg/kg/day