Over the last decades, we have witnessed an increasing interest in food-related products containing vegetable oils. These oils can be obtained either by extraction or by mechanical pressing of different parts of plants (e.g., seeds, fruit, and drupels). Producers of nutraceuticals have ceaselessly searched for unique and effective natural ingredients. The enormous success of argan oil has been followed by discoveries of other interesting vegetable oils (e.g., pomegranate oil) containing several bioactives. This work describes the pomegranate fruit extract and seed oil as a rich source of conjugated linolenic acid as a metabolite of punicic acid (PA), deriving from the omega-5 family (ω-5). Through the chemical characterization of PA, its nutritional and therapeutic properties are highlighted together with the physiological properties that encourage its use in human nutrition. We analyzed the composition of all fatty acids with beneficial properties occurring in pomegranate seed oil using gas chromatography (GC) with flame-ionization detection (FID) analysis combined with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Pomegranate seed oil mainly consists of 9,11,13-octadic-trienoic acid (18:3), corresponding to 73 wt % of the total fatty acids. Nine components were identified by GC in PSO, varying between 0.58 and 73.19 wt %. Using midinfrared (MIR) spectroscopy, we compared the composition of pomegranate seed oil with that of meadowfoam seed oil (MSO), which is also becoming increasingly popular in the food industry due to its high content of long chain fatty acids (C20-22), providing increased oil stability. From the results of FTIR and MIR spectroscopy, we found that punicic acid is unique in PSO (73.19 wt %) but not in MSO.
Keywords: MIR spectroscopy; flame-ionization detection; gas chromatography; pomegranate seed oil; punicic acid; vegetable oils.