Influence of a dry fractionation of butterfat on the content of fatty acids including conjugated linoleic acids

Summary

There is a growing demand among consumers for food products with natural nutritional-physiological advantages over comparable conventional products. As part of an EU project, a process using dry fractionation is evaluated that enables the targeted lowinput enrichment of conjugated linoleic acids (CLA) in milk fat. Furthermore, the distribution of CLA isomers in the fat fractions was analysed. In the olein fraction for highland butter a CLA enrichment of 15.3% was obtained.
The yield of the CLA rich olein fraction was 44.5% of the total amount of olein and stearin. There were significant increases during the first fractionation step of highland butter for the concentration of the CLA isomer cis-9, trans-11 (P £ 0.05) and during the second fractionation step for the concentration of CLA isomers cis-9, trans-11; trans-11, cis-13 (P £ 0.05) and trans-7, cis- 9 (P £ 0.01). Experiments carried out demonstrate that the selected physical separation process enables CLA enrichment but the increase is too minor to achieve any decisive positive impact on human health and therefore too costly as an industrial CLA enrichment process.