The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has notified regulations fixing Total Polar Compounds for unused and used edible vegetable oil.
Called the Food Safety and Standards Third Amendment Regulations, 2020, it says, “The Total Polar Compounds in unused or fresh vegetable oil or fat shall not be more than 15% and used vegetable oil or fat having developed Total Polar Compounds more than 25% shall not be used.”
In a statement, FSSAI has said that it has put in place robust regulatory measures under three major pillars: Eat Safe, Eat Health and Eat Sustainably and prescribed a limit for TPCs at 25% in cooking oil to avoid the harmful effects of reused cooking oil.
It has been noticed that in most of the cases, cooking oil is used repeatedly and even mixed with the new oil, which is not a safe practice, according to a senior official with the apex food regulator FSSAI. Even there was an order in place by the FSSAI that prohibits mixing of new oil with used one from March 2019.
Using same oil repeatedly for frying leads to changes in the physico-chemical, nutritional, sensory properties of the oil and formation of TPCs, which makes the oil unfit for human consumption beyond certain limits leading to several diseases such as hypertension, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease and liver disease.
The FSSAI has also taken initiatives like MoUs with various agencies that would help convert the used cooking oil into biodiesel.
The record should have following details like date, name of the oil, quantity of oil used in frying, quantity consumed at the end of the day, quantity discarded at the end of the day, mode and date of disposal of used cooking oil and UCO collected by(name of authorised agency).