Abstract:
This article introduces carbon paste electroactive electrodes in combination with
voltammetric measurements as a useful tool for simple, low-cost, efficient, and
semi-quantitative assessment of the quality of various vegetable oils. The respective
method is based on anodic oxidation of electroactive organic compounds (namely:
phenolic compounds and lipophilic vitamins) that naturally occur in the samples of
interest and, in this case, being admixed in a small quantity directly into the carbon
paste bulk. All the experiments were performed in 0.1 mol L−1 acetate buffer (pH 4.5) in
the square-wave voltammetric mode. The results obtained have shown that the proposed
procedure can be applied in food control to authenticate - as an electrochemical
fingerprinting - the kind and the quality of a vegetable oil, including its freshness.
