Discrimination, quantitation, and identification of edible vegetable oil blends based on their fatty acid profiles

Abstract

Based on the most common vegetable oil blends, binary and ternary analytical mixtures were constructed in mass fractions from 0.50 to 0.97, and their fatty acid profile was determined and represented graphically. The fatty acids with discriminatory power were selected to construct equations to predict commercial oil blend proportions. Three different linear equations resulted from the analysis for i. palm oil-based blends: y = (0.3713 ± 0.0217)x + (11.401 ± 0.68) for C18:2 and (0.4357 ± 0.0254)x + (51.281 ± 2.90) for C16:0 ii. soybean oil-based blends y = (-0.0789 ± 0.0046)x + (30.686 ± 1.71) for C18:1 and (0.0686 ± 0.0040)x - (0.1395 ± 0.0081) for C18:3 and iii. sunflower oil-based blends y = (-0.0552 ± 0.0032)x + (12.167 ± 0.6105) for C16:0. Finally, the fatty acid profiles of n = 10 commercial samples (i.e., vegetable oil blends) were determined, and the model was applied to them with satisfactory results.