[Secondary lipid oxidation products. Human health risks evaluation (Article 1)]

The first article of the series describes possible applications of both proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (¹Н NMR) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) in food lipid thermo-oxidation analysis. Thermo-oxidation process is a source of various oxidation products. Some of them are known to be toxic, such as oxidized α,β-unsaturated aldehydes and epoxidized linoleic acid derivatives. Today we know that routine nonspecific methods in lipid oxidation analysis are not informative, may provide incorrect results and procedures are long and laborious. Therefore it might be useful to find more reliable, accurate and informative physic-chemical methods measuring food lipid oxidation status. This paper is devoted to the most widely used in lipid analysis spectroscopic methods such as ¹Н NMR and FTIR. It has been shown that ¹Н NMR and FTIR provide more information on the types, formation and degradation time of compounds formed than wet chemistry methods. ¹Н NMR gives qualitative and quantitative information on degraded and newly formed compounds and FTIR is able to measure a lot of standard oxidation indices with high accuracy. Both of them allow us to trace any compounds' evolution in lipid matrices in real time. Mention is made of their advantages for routine laboratory analysis.