Chicken MSM is produced by recovering the residual flesh under very high pressure after the removal of chicken parts from the carcase. Because of the production method, it has lost it myofibrillar structure, and is recovered as a paste. It has to be labelled separately if used in meat products such as sausages. An LC-MS/MS method has been developed, which uses intervertebral disc and cartilage specific peptides to detect MSM in meat and sausage products.The method was validated using a blinded study. In conclusion, the LC–MS/MS assay allowed the specific detection of MSM in real samples with unknown composition down to 10% MSM in the meat content.
This method was used to analyse 30 poultry sausages and meat products manufactured in Germany, which found that 9 of the samples tested positive for undeclared chicken MSM, which the manufacturers deny.
Read the open access LC-MS/MS paper here and the Press article on the survey here
Comments
The MSM-negative samples of this study were made of chicken breast which was gained by hand of a employed butcher. You can't compare hand-obtained meat with industrial (non-MSM-) chicken meat standards. In my eyes, this is a big failure in this study and therefore the results are not reliable. I guess in industrial (non-MSM-) meat-standards you could find the mentioned marker proteins from cartilage, too.