Tracing the Source of Cooking Oils with an Integrated Approach of Using Stable Carbon Isotope and Fatty Acid Abundance

Abstract

We report a new approach to identify swill-cooked oils that are recycled from tainted food and livestock waste from commercial vegetable and animal oils by means of carbon isotope values and relative abundance of fatty acids. We test this method using 40 cooking oil samples of different types with known sources. We found significant differences in both total organic carbon isotope as well as compound-specific isotope values and fatty acid C(14)/C(18) ratios between commercial vegetable oils refined from C(3) plants (from -35.7 to -27.0‰ and from 0 to 0.15) and animal oils (from -28.3 to -14.3‰ and from 0.1 to 0.6). Tested swill-cooked oils, which were generally refined by mixing with animal waste illegally, fall into a narrow δ(13)C/fatty acid ratio distribution: from -25.9 to -24.1‰ and from 0.1 to 0.2. Our data demonstrate that the index of a cross-plotting between fatty acid δ(13)C values and C(14)/C(18) ratios can be used to distinguish clean commercial cooking oils from illegal swill-cooked oils.