Innovation Techniques to Assess Adulterated Ghee: A Review

Abstract

Adulteration in dairy products is not only serious trouble to mortal health but also causes profitable losses. Ghee, the most precious fat, is vented at a high price over other fats and oil. Unethical vendors take advantage of this by mixing ghee with inexpensive fats or oils. Adulteration of ghee could be estimated through its physical-chemical constants such as Butyro-Refractometer reading, Reichert-Meissl value, Polenske value, Iodine value, saponification value, which are time-consuming, Therefore, researchers nowadays adopted novel techniques. The addition of coconut oil in ghee is detected using Attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) and chemometrics. Analysis of the adulteration in cow ghee with soybean oil by olfactory machine system, electronic nose (E-nose) tool is used as a rapid technique. Analysis of adulteration in cow ghee with vanaspati by using an image analysis technique called particle analysis and colour measurement and a rapid and accessible protocol based on β-sitosterol using Reversed-phase thin layer chromatography (RP-TLC) is developed to check the purity of milk fat. DPPH (2, 2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) based chromogenic assay is a rapid method that has been used to identify the presence of palm oil in ghee.