Miguel Duarte Ferro

European Olive Oil and Some Chinese Oils: Chromatographic Analysis and Comparison of Their Chemical Composition Miguel Duarte Ferro

Olive oil is a well known vegetable oil due to its beneficial effects on human's health and its strong economic importance in the Mediterranean area, being this region alone responsible for more than 90% of the world production. In other regions, such as the Chinese one, olive oil is not that commonly used, being other vegetable oils, such as tea seed oil, rapeseed oil, sesame oil, corn oil and peanut oil, rather used to prepare the daily meals. The unique characteristics of each type of vegetable oil are directly related to the fatty acid distribution, being this way the study of the fatty acid composition a good way to characterize them. So, the main goals of this work are: (1) to check for patterns in olive oil samples, from different regions of the Iberian Peninsula, through their fatty acid composition by GC-MS fingerprinting technique coupled with PCA and PLS chemometric methods, and also between European olive oil and some Chinese edible oils; (2) to validate the used fingerprinting method through its both inter- and intra-laboratorial comparison.