Analysis of Olive Oil and Seed Oil Triglycerides by Capillary Gas Chromatography as a Tool for the Detection of the Adulteration of Olive Oil

Individual triglyceride (TG) species of olive oil and several seed oils (corn, cottonseed, palm, peanut, soybean, and sunflower) are baseline separated on a WCOT TAP CB fused-silica capillary column by capillary gas chromatography (CGC) with a flame-ionization detector (FID) and either cold on-column or split injection. An adulteration of olive oil with a low content (< 5%) of these seed oils (except peanut oil) can be verified by the detection of the increasing levels of trilinolein or tripalmitin in olive oil in which these TG species are normally absent or present at very low levels (< 0.5%). An adulteration with over 20% peanut oil can be detected by the increasing levels of palmitodilinolein. TG species that can be coeluted with trilinolein in the reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatographic (RP-HPLC) mode are baseline separated by the CGC technique, and their structures are identified by selective ion monitoring mass spectrometry. The following comparisons--the CGC-FID and RP-HPLC methods for detection of adulteration, cold on-column and split-injection modes for CGC-FID, and silylation or thin-layer chromatography pretreatment and simple dilution of one or more of the oil samples--are also presented. The normalized percentage area of the TG species is sufficient for the method limits used in this study. Mixtures of virgin olive oil with refined or residue olive oil could not be distinguished from the virgin type by the method used in this study.