Page 18 of articles about nutrition in Articles

Since concentrated feeds were first used it has been possible to see that mixing them with water has certain advantages. Probably the most important are a higher consumption and an improved exploitation.

The gestation unit is basically a parking unit where sows should be kept comfortable to allow the pregnancy to develop

Regardless of the causes we often waste food and the animals do not consume everything that arrives to the farm.

Arginine and glutamine (members of the arginine family of amino acids) are major building blocks for proteins and essential precursors for synthesis of many substances with enormous biological importance.

In order to apply the most suitable feeding regime to newly weaned pigs it is important to balance the trade off between the detrimental effect on performance of feeding levels of protein that are too low to allow maximal growth and those which increase the risk of post weaning diarrhoea.

Tryptophan has positive effects on voluntary feed intake. This greater feed intake leads to increased growth performance and improved feed conversion ratio in piglets, and to lower body weight losses in sows during lactation.

Low maternal feed levels cause a reduction in muscle fibre numbers, whereas enhanced maternal nutrition resulted in a higher number of muscle fibres in specific muscles.

Without a doubt weaning is the most stressful process suffered by a pig, or at least it is up until that moment in its life.

The AMPs (also called host defence peptides) are small gene encoded peptides of 1 to 5 kDa that have a broad range of activity against gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, fungi and mycobacteria

A challenge in animal production today is to raise livestock within new environmental rules and regulations. Although most states in the United States regulate swine waste application based on N concentration, more are changing to P-based regulations.

Our research model has been a short chain fructooligosaccharide (scFOS) fed to swine. This compound was selected because it was identified in human and swine milk, was shown to have health benefits in human infants and patients recovering from intestinal anastomosis. The health benefit was believed to occur via the trophic effect of scFOS on the Bifidobacteria population.

Fiber includes a great variety of components with different physicochemical properties that will affect the digestive processes, separately or by combining, in properties such as solubility, viscosity, formation of gels, water retention capacity, bulkiness, endogenous secretions, nutrient absorption, fermentations, intestinal transit, etc.

Due to their multiple effects at a physiologic and cellular level organic acids function as antimicrobials, modifiers of the intestinal flora, pH reducers, stimulants of pancreatic secretion and of the growth of intestinal microvilli, improvers of the gastric and intestinal flora, inhibitors of ammoniac production and of other metabolic depressors of growth, as well as energetic.

The consequences of the inflammatory and immune responses on tryptophan metabolism could impair the availability of tryptophan for body protein accretion, growth and all other metabolic processes involving this amino acid.

Fish meal has always been the main source and the preferred choice of nutritionists for quality protein, above all in the formulation of feed for the youngest ages.

Piglets face a very stressful process at weaning and feed intake becomes one of the most limiting issues.