Traceability and authenticity of dietary lipids.

Traceability is becoming a method of providing safer food supplies and of connecting producers and consumers. This chapter aims to analyze legal and regulatory aspects of food provenance and to discuss the principal techniques that have been successfully applied to lipid authentication, namely separation techniques, spectroscopic techniques, DNA-based techniques and mass spectrometry techniques. In addition to these applications, an extensive analysis of stable isotopes techniques in the field of food traceability and the most relevant literature in fats and oil authenticity by means of stable isotopes applications are presented and discussed. Especially, the case of extra-virgin olive oil is discussed, considering its adulteration such as the mislabelling of country of origin, the biggest food fraud issues in the EU, and the future trends in this field.