Effort to improve the quantitative determination of oxidation and hydrolysis compound classes in edible vegetable oils

This paper proposes an analytical method to evaluate the classes of products of polymerization, oxidation and hydrolysis as well as the polar compounds present in refined edible oils in a more reliable fashion. The polar compounds of a marketed refined peanut oil were analyzed by preparative gel permeation chromatography and the classes of substances corresponding to single chromatogram peaks were collected by means of a fraction collector, purified and used as standards for high-performance size-exclusion chromatographic analysis. The linearity of detector response, the precision and accuracy of the method for each class of compounds and for polar compounds were assessed. Another aim was to verify whether this method may be applied to other refined peanut oils and to edible vegetable oils in general, even of different botanical origin, using the standards that had already been prepared for that particular peanut oil. The results obtained showed that this was possible and the analytical method developed can be extended to the most common edible vegetable oils. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.