Determination of 16 Trans Fatty Acids in Ice Cream

A gas chromatographic (GC) method to determine the contents of 16 trans fatty acids in ice cream was established. The 2.0 g samples were pretreated sequentially with 8 mL of hydrochloric acid and 10 mL of anhydrous ethanol, separated on an SP-2560 capillary column, detected by GC with a flame ionization detector (FID) and quantified by the peak area normalization method. Under optimized chromatographic conditions, the limit of detection and limit of quantification of the proposed method were 0.012% and 0.024%, respectively, and it allowed effective separation of trans fatty acid methyl esters from cis fatty acid methyl esters and saturated fatty acid methyl esters.