Comparative studies on the antioxidant activity of aqueous extracts of olive oils and seed oils using chemiluminescence Original Research Article

A sensitive and simple procedure is described for measuring the antioxidant activity (AA) of olive oil and seed oil aqueous extracts using the chemiluminescence of N,N′-dimethyl-9,9′-biacridinium dinitrate (lucigenin). It was found that olive oil aqueous extracts showed 2–10 times higher AA than seed oils. This impressive difference is attributed to the higher content of phenolic compounds present in olive oils. Spectrophotometric and fluorimetric measurements affirmed this hypothesis. As shown in this paper, the reported method could also be used for the quantitation of total phenols in aqueous oil extracts. It was found that commercial and non-commercial Greek olive oil aqueous extracts contain 55.3–125.9 mg caffeic acid equivalents per kilogram, while seed oils, only 0.6–3.2 mg kg−1.