Oils and fats (vegetal or animal) a

Oils and fats (vegetal or animal) are important components of the
foods. There are a wide variety of products based entirely on fats and
oils or containing fats and oils as a major portion of their composition,
such as cocoa butter, salad and cooking oils, margarines, shortenings,
salad dressings, and confectioner's coatings (O'Brien, 2009). The performance of the oils and fats in these applications is dependent of their
quality, specially the authenticity, purity and some intrinsic quality
parameters.
Edible oils and fats are one of the foods most frequently counterfeited
(Fig. 1). A survey on food fraud from 1980 until 2010 revealed that olive oil is one of the foods with the highest fraud cases (Moore, Spink, & Lipp,
2012). The study considered international data from scholarly and media
reports obtained by various authors; the fraud detections were assessed
by different analytical methods. The data from this study were compiled
and are available in a database (Food Fraud Database) at www.
foodfraud.org. A recent search in this database resulted in 432 fraud
records for oils, 320 for milk, and 124 for honey.
The American Oil Chemists' Society (AOCS) establishes a number of
official methods (Official Methods and Recommended Practices of the
AOCS) to assess the quality of oils and fats (Firestone, 2009). Most of
these methods are relatively simple, but some are time-consuming,
expensive, use harmful reagents, generate wastes and are strongly dependent on rigorously following a standardized procedure to obtain
accuracy. Anyway, these methods are adopted by industries, academy
and inspection agencies.