Is animal fat in Tirupati laddus? | Explained

Members of Hindu organizations stage a demonstration at Garuda Circle, the entry point of Tirumala hill, in Tirupati on September 26, 2024. Photo: Special Arrangements

The story so far: Laddu prasadams from the temple town of Tirupati have left a bad taste after reports that ghee from cow’s milk, a traditional ingredient, may have been mixed with fat from various sources including beef tallow.

What is the charge?

A technical report by the National Dairy Development Board’s Center for Analysis and Learning in Livestock and Food (CALF), which analyzed samples of ghee supplied to Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, the temple’s manager, found it to be adulterated.

There are fats from soybeans, sunflower oil, rapeseed oil, flaxseed, wheat germ, corn germ, cottonseed, fish oil, coconut oil and palm kernel, palm oil, beef fat and lard.

Editor | Politicizing the laddu: On the Tirupati laddu and its ‘adulteration’

While allegations that adulterated ghee was used to prepare prasadam have been around for months, this is the first time that animal fat – from beef and pork – has been mentioned by no less than Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu in a public forum. .

What is the process to find out if milk fat has been mixed?

Milk fat, like all organic fats, contains triglycerides. It is the glycerol linked to the fatty acid and carbon chain that characterizes triglycerides. There are ‘short chain,’ ‘medium chain’ and ‘long chain’ fatty acids determined by the number of carbon atoms in the chain. Milk fat has more than 400 fatty acids that are structurally different and can combine in a variety of ways to form thousands of triglyceride molecules. Thus, the pattern of triglycerides in cow’s ghee is different from ghee made from goat’s milk, lard, soybean or other vegetable oils. Because cow’s ghee is expensive, mixing it with cheaper fat is an old practice, and various methods have been developed to detect adulteration. For precision, the most advanced method in the dairy industry is the use of gas chromatography. This method can be used to separate the chemical constituents of a sample mixture made of organic compounds. The machine is expensive and can cost ₹30-40 lakh but it is standard in reputed shops. Just as an electrocardiogram produces an oscillating wave signal meant to represent the heartbeat, the result of gas chromatography analysis of a ghee sample is a characteristic waveform that shows the proportion of different types of triglycerides. Pure cow ghee has a distinctive pattern that differs from vegetable oil or lard (pork fat).

For adulteration analysis, the German scientist Dietz Precht, in 1991, came up with a set of five equations. Each one produces a ‘value’ (default value) and can be used to determine a particular forgery. Value of point s1 for adulteration with soybean, sunflower oil, rapeseed, fish oil; s2 for coconut and palm kernel oil; s3 for palm oil and beef fat; s4 for lard and s5 for total adulterated fat in a given specimen. For a sample of ghee to be pure cow’s ghee, all five values ​​must be in the range specified in the window 3 or 4 to 100. the presence of ‘foreign fat.’ This process is a standard protocol recommended by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and is carried out in reputed Indian laboratories such as CALF.

What does fat analysis find in Tirupati laddus?

Two samples of cow ghee were tested. All values ​​(s1-s5) in both examples are outside the specified range. For example, in one example, the value of s3 – related to palm oil and beef fat – is 22.43, from a range of 95.9 to 104.1. But this alone does not indicate the presence of beef tallow. “Although the individual s values ​​(ie s1, s2, s3 & s4) are more sensitive to specific foreign fats than the general s values ​​(s5), the positive results obtained only in one s value do not allow to draw conclusions on the type of foreign fats,” he said review of Precht’s method Indian Journal of Dairy Science in October 2023 by KD Aparanthi, from Anand University of Agriculture, and co-authors. “… In actual practice, specific foreign fats generally remain unknown, because most foreign fats are identified by the method as a group and not as a specific foreign fat (except lard). The same problem arises when a mixture of foreign fats is mixed in milk fat .In addition, the number in this case, s3 = 22.43, does not indicate the percentage or amount of the substance. In the given test, the intrusive ‘s’ value can be calculated when the value of ‘s’ exceeds 100. This is not the case for s3, here.

Is there a way to distinguish between fat sources?

There is a mathematical way to interpret individual values ​​to determine the presence of certain types of fat but this has not been specified in the CALF report. While this method was developed for European cattle, applying it to Indian cattle may require changing the ‘s’ value. This can be calculated only after the biochemical database of ghee in Indian cows, which may have different genetics, and Indian tallow is known. “There is a wide biological variation in a species. However, by using spectrographic methods, we can accurately detect the nature and percentage of adulterants that provide good baseline data, specific to Indian conditions,” said Dr. Madhusudhan Rao, a scientist at the Center for Cellular Biology and Molecules, Hyderabad. The Hindu.