A Pilot Study for the Statistical Treatment of Nutritional Parameters in the Quality Control of Canned Fishing Goods

This pilot study was derived as a consequence of European Directives 496/90 and 493/91 in which a regulation on the labeling of canned fishing goods was established. The study was intended primarily to assess whether different Spanish canned fishing goods might be differentiated by their basic nutritional composition (i.e., ash, chlorine as NaCl, fat, humidity, total proteins, and dry residue) and, second, to study each particular type of good. Accordingly, a univariate nonparametric statistical test and 2 multivariate chemometric techniques (factor and cluster analyses) were used. The pilot study revealed that (1) the basic nutritional variables did not allow a clear distinction among canned goods when different commodities were considered, but they seemed useful for obtaining information for only one type of good; and (2) the variables that gave the most useful information to visualize the appearance of groups in the data sets were humidity, dry residue, fat, and proteins, although their particular usefulness was found to be different when different species were considered.