Today, phenols are used to produce medicines, paints, and inexpensive furniture made of chipboard or MDF panels and also to process food. Some of them are capable of imparting a pleasant smoky aroma to food, so they are often added to sausage or fish. But if we eat something that is high in phenols, it can have a deleterious effect on our health, so at factories they pay close attention to their concentrations in food. During tests, more often than not meat samples are dissolved in alkalis (in which phenols are very soluble), but the resulting emulsions require additional purification from the fats contained in sausage.
Click here for original story, Chemists learn how to detect phenols in smoked food samples using vitamin B4
Source: Phys.org