The Effect of Heating on Vitamin E Decomposition in Edible Palm Oil

Abstract

Currently, palm oil is popular in consumption, and vitamin E in palm oil has been used to indicate the quality. In addition to complexity processing of crude palm oil to edible oil that loses vitamin E, the use of high-heat for cooking, can cause vitamin decay. Therefore, this research aims to study the limit of how much heat affects on vitamin E decomposition; and this result will bring useful information to apply in cooking. This investigation was performed with oil having vitamin E concentration at 80 mg l^-1 to be heated. Samples were collected when the oil was heated and started smoking and samples were collected every 15 minutes. Then, the samples were analyzed for the vitamin E through the extraction process of a solid phase extraction (SPE), which uses C18 as solid sorbent and dichloromethane as eluent Gas chromatography equipped with flame ionization detector (GC- FID) was operated under the temperature programming mode for quantitative analysis. The results show that the percentage of vitamin E degradation would continuously increase in temperatures ranging from 210 °C to 278 °C and this degradation rate still constant after a half of hour expansion for oil heating at 278 °C. So, it’s concluded that longer time used in the heating process could affect less to the vitamin E decomposition than increasing the temperature.