Abstract: A method for the simultaneous determination of Sibutramine and other 18 prohibited additives in health-protecting tea by ultra high performance liquid chromatography triple quadrupole tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS) was established．Samples were extracted by ultrasonic extraction from 1% formic acid methanol solution for 20 min and purified by QuEChERS dispersive solid-phase extraction kit. The mobile phase was 0.1% formic acid in acetonitrile and 0.2 mL·min^-1 flow gradient elution was used in Agilent ZORBAX Eclipse Plus-C₁₈ column．Electrospray ion source positive ion scanning, multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode were determined and external standard method was used for quantification. The results show that the linearity of 18 kinds of illegal additives was good, with the correlation coefficient more than 0.999. The detection limit was 0.5-5.0 μg·kg^-1. The quantitative limit of the method was 2-18 μg·kg^-1. RSD was 0.5%-5.1% and the recovery rate was 87.3%-103.8%. This method was used to analyze 30 batches of health-protecting tea samples, of which 7 batches were positive samples. This method has strong pertinence,simple operation, high accuracy and fast detection speed. It is suitable for the determination of 18 kinds of forbidden additives in health-protecting tea. This paper also provided a scientific basis for the quality control and safety evaluation of health-protecting tea.

Key words: UPLC-MS-MS, QuEChERS, health-protecting tea, contraband drugs