A growing body of evidence highlights the close association between nutrition and human health. Fat is an essential macronutrient, and vegetable oils, such as palm oil, are widely used in the food industry and highly represented in the human diet. Palmitic acid, a saturated fatty acid, is the principal constituent of refined palm oil. In the last few decades, controversial studies have reported...

The presence of lard in vegetable oils like palm oil is serious matter for certain communities like Muslim and Hindis. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy has been used for determination of lard in palm oil. Lard, palm oil and their binary mixtures in the neat form was scanned at mid infrared region (4,000 – 650 cm-1) using attenuated total reflectance accessory as convenient samplin...

Palm oil and soybean oil are the 2 most widely used cooking oils in the world. Palm oil is consumed mainly in developing countries, where morbidity and mortality due to cardiovascular disease (CVD) are on the rise. Although claims about adverse or protective effects of these oils are commonly made, there are no epidemiologic studies assessing the association between these oils and cardiovascula...

G lobally, vegetable oils are harvested from a handful of oil crops at an annual rate exceeding 100 million tons (1). Most oils are used for human or animal consumption, although a minor fraction is derivatized to oleochemicals. More recently, an increasing amount of vegetable oil is being diverted to the production of biodiesel [i.e., fatty acid (FA) methylesters], and is an attractive feedsto...

INTRODUCTION Vegetable oils undergo appreciable deterioration during processing and storage. The residual free fatty acid (FFA) concentration of vegetable oils is a function of the processing and storage conditions. Vegetable oils spoilage, usually defined as rancidity, is the result of fatty acid moity has been recognized as the point of attack in peroxide formation Peroxide-forming reactions ...

Oil palm supplies >30% of world vegetable oil production1. Plantation expansion is occurring throughout the tropics, predominantly in Indonesia, where forests with heterogeneous carbon stocks undergo high conversion rates2–4. Quantifying oil palm’s contribution to global carbon budgets therefore requires refined spatio-temporal assessments of land cover converted to plantations5,6. Here, we rep...

Palm oil contributes about 19% of worldwide vegetable oil production with Malaysia accounting for over 50% of total production. Due to the global rise in crude oil prices, scientists have been forced to look for cheaper alternatives and palm oil has provided the right platform. This in turn led to an increase in the oil plantations and production in countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Tha...

Our society faces the pressing challenge of increasing agricultural production while minimizing negative consequences on ecosystems and the global climate. Indonesia, which has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from deforestation while doubling production of several major agricultural commodities, exemplifies this challenge. Here we focus on palm oil, the world's most abundant ve...

This article highlights the importance of the role that palm oil plays in meeting the demand for oils and fats worldwide for food. On top of this food demand, the demand for vegetable oils for biofuels, which now absorb over 10% of world oil and fat supplies, has rapidly increased.

Analytical methods are required in addition to administrative controls to verify the geographical origin of vegetable oils such as palm oil in an objective manner. In this study the application of fatty acid and volatile organic compound fingerprinting in combination with chemometrics have been applied to verify the geographical origin of crude palm oil (continental scale). For this purpose 94 ...