Detection of Adulteration in Coconut Oil and Virgin Coconut Oil Using Advanced Analytical Techniques: A Review.

Coconut (CO) and virgin coconut oil (VCO) are popular functional oils owing to their health benefits. The fraudsters intentionally blend cheap and poor-quality vegetable oils with CO and VCO for economic benefits. Adulteration causes safety and health issues for consumers. In this context, there is a need for rapid, accurate, and precise analytical techniques to detect adulteration in CO and VCO. Conventional analytical methods are arduous and lengthy processes using toxic chemicals and involve tedious sample preparation. Thus, food researchers are in search of precise, rapid, and green analytical techniques to detect and quantify the adulteration of CO and VCO. The present review focuses on summarizing all the analytical techniques along with chemometric tools developed in recent times. Various techniques, such as chromatographic, spectroscopic, and thermal techniques coupled with chemometrics, have been successfully applied in this field. The NIR-based spectroscopic technique is a very optimisable and practical method for adulteration detection in CO and VCO. The official methods currently used must be upgraded as they are comparatively less sensitive than the latest methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]