Measurement of Butyric Acid in Fat with Reference to the Detection of Substitute Fats in Dairy Products

Recently, there has been an increasing number of dairy products in which a part or all of the butterfat has been replaced by various vegetable and/or animal fats. The ease with which such products might be sold fraudulently as full butterfat products has emphasized the need for more precise methods of detecting fat mixtures. Older methods of fat analysis, such as the Reichert-Meissl, Polenski, and l~ehner, are now thought to be inadequate in detecting mixtures of butterfat and other fats because they lack specificity and sensitivity. Consequently, a number of other methods have been prepared or are the subject of current investigations.