With the continuously expanding market of lipid based foods and food supplements, their authenticity and quality become important subjects from both commercial and health perspectives, while food adulteration becomes a growing concern for the food industry, regulatory authorities and the consumer. Monitoring the authenticity and quality of edible oils and fats has been carried out using instrumental techniques that provide data about their qualitative and quantitative composition. Several procedures can be used for authentication of edible oils and fats. Most often these include analysis of fatty acids, triacylglycerols and sterols. The methods and procedures for control of composition, quality and authenticity of foods and lipid-containing food supplements developed and used during the last 15 years in the Laboratory of Lipid Chemistry at the Institute of Organic Chemistry with Centre of Phytochemistry – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, are presented here. These include determination of neutral lipid classes by TLC, analysis of triacylglycerols (including regioisomers) by Ag-HPLC and RP-HPLC, fatty acid configurational (cis/trans) and positional isomers as various esters by Ag-TLC, Ag-HPLC, GC, GC-MS on 4,4-dimethyloxazoline derivatives, sterols by GC and GC-MS.

Examples for analysis of natural and modified edible oils, food supplements, lipid extracts from mushrooms, as well as detection of vegetable oils in milk fat and derived products (cheese, yoghurt), trans-fatty acids content of butter, margarines etc., are presented on the poster.

Key words: lipid analysis, fatty acids, triacylglycerols, sterols, adulteration