Critical Evaluation of Analytical Methods for the Determination of Anthropogenic Organic Contaminants in Edible Oils: An Overview of the Last Five Years

Abstract

Anthropogenic contaminants, as pesticides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and monochloropropanediols (MCPDs), have become important to be controlled in edible oils, since their regular occurrence. In fact, alerts from the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) in oils normally include these compounds. From a critical point of view, tools used to control these compounds in the last 5 years will be discussed, including sample preparation, analysis and current regulations. Extraction and analysis methods will be discussed next, being liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) and QuEChERS, with or without clean-up step, as well as chromatographic methods coupled to different analyzers (mainly mass spectrometry), the most commonly used for extraction and analysis respectively. Occurrence in samples will also be reviewed and compared with the legal maximum residue limits (MRLs), observing that 4%, 20% and 60% of the analyzed samples exceed the legal limits for pesticides, MCPDs and PAHs respectively.

Keywords:

• Determination
• edible oils
• LLE
• MCPDs
• PAHs
• pesticides

Acknowledgments

RLR acknowledges to the Andalusia Ministry of Economic Transformation, Industry, Knowledge and Universities for financial support from “Ayudas para Captación, Incorporación y Movilidad de Capital Humano de I + D + i (PAIDI 2020)”.

Conflict of interest

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.