Fatty Acids Composition in Selected Catering Products

Intake of dietary lipid is relevant to human health and should be subject of an extended research regarding quantitative and qualitative aspects. Catering food products investigated in the current study have been chosen from two food groups: fish based food products and meat based food products. Fatty acids were analyzed by gas chromatography (GC) with flame ionization detection (FID), a Shimadzu GC-17A series gas-chromatograph, equipped with a 30m polyethylene glycol coated column (Alltech AT-WAX, 0.25mm I.D., 0.25µm film thickness). Helium was used as the carrier gas at a pressure of 147 kPa. The injector and detector temperatures were set at 260ºC. For the oven temperature the following programe was used: 70ºC for 2 min. then raised to 150ºC at 10ºC/ min. rate and held at 150ºC for 3min., then further raised up to 235ºC at a 4ºC/min. A number of ten food samples were investigated. It was found that in the case of products from both food groups analyzed the predominant fatty acid is the oleic acid (18:1) and significant values for palmitic (16:0), linoleic (18:2) and stearic acid (18:0). The ratio between PUFA/SFA is 0.4 for the fish based products and 0.6 for the meat based products, lower than the threshold of 1.5 which is considered not to raise negative health effects.