Vegetable oil blending: A review of physicochemical, nutritional and health effects

Abstract Background Oils and fats have many functions in food product preparation. Quality, stability and nutritional features of oils are the most important factors in food technology. There is no pure oil with good functional and nutritional properties and appropriate oxidative stability. Therefore, vegetable oils are modified using different methods to enhance their commercial applications and to improve their nutritional quality. Modification methods are hydrogenation, interesterification, fractionation and blending. Scope and approach Trans isomers of fatty acids formed during hydrogenation are known to have negative effects on health. Interesterification needs special equipment and is more expensive. Fractionation is also applicable only for some fats/oils. Blending should not have any adverse effects on health attributes. Blending vegetable fats/oils with different compositions and properties is one of the simplest methods to create new specific products with desired textural, oxidative and nutritional properties which lead to improved industrial applications. Key findings and conclusions This paper is a brief review of recent publications on the positive advantages of blending vegetable oils with different properties to obtain new oil mixtures. There are many researches on oil blending, and results show that oil blending is widely used in food industry to produce blended oils with improved stability and nutritional characteristics at an affordable price. In the future, there are also many economical and health reasons for the production of new oil blends using new and conventional oil sources to be introduced to the market.