Chemometrics in food research: Relationships between triglyceride groups and fatty acid composition in olive oil

The values (mol %) of the triglyceride Gnu groups, each containing all the molecular species with the same carbon numer and unsaturation, are different for various oils; in this paper, their use for analytical purposes is therefore hypothesized. To this end, the values (mol %) of Gnu groups—with respective means, standard deviations and coefficients of variation‐were first of all established using the l, 3‐random‐2‐random distribution hypothesis on 50 olive oil samples; with these values, along with the relative data of the fatty acid composition, a computer study was carried out to obtain some regression models of use for estimating the Gnu values (mol %) of other olive oil samples. The evaluation of the regression models procedure (RMP) was carried out comparing the values obtained by such a method for 6 other commercial olive oils with those experimentally determined by Ag+‐TLC coupled with direct triglyceride GLC analysis. Moreover, these models were tested with the data of fatty acid composition of 4 different seed oils, providing often negative Gnu values, always different, however, from those of olive oil.