A new wave of thinking is approaching the feed industry. It is being led by a new understanding of what feed ingredients actually do.
20th century thinking meant that there were only three categories of feed; fuels, building blocks, and enzymatic cofactors. But today animal nutrition is entering a new phase, where all feed raw materials are known to influence how an animal develops, what it produces, and how it recovers from illness. This means that even bulk feed, previously added just for calories, may also carry instructional information.
This new understanding is revolutionising the feed industry and has been labelled Nutrition 2.0. It is a theory that was explained in more depth by Prof Barry Bradford, a dairy specialist and nutritional scientist from Kansas State University, at the 2018 Cornell Nutritional Conference in New York.
Prof Barry Bradford, a dairy specialist and nutritional scientist from Kansas State University
Here Bradford explained that, “Probably the most important thing we’ve learnt is that all classes of nutrients bind to and activate receptors on cells to change the function of those cells. Even if a nutrient isn’t necessarily used as a fuel or a building block or a co-factor in that cell, so Nutrient 2.0 brings in new mechanisms that nutrients can affect animals through beyond those first three ways that people identified earlier in the 1900’s”
As a practical guide, Bradford gave an example of a nutrient that was previously thought to be of little worth beyond its calorie value; butyrate. He explained how, “In Nutrition 1.0 butyrate is basically just a fuel, you can also turn it into fatty acids, but it is essentially an energy source whether you store it or burn it right away. But now we have all these interesting mechanisms, [we know that] butyrate binds to and changes cell function, and in multiple cell types, so it’s not just boring cells, it’s also changing T-cells that the immune system produces.”
This means that butyrate is no longer only for energy but could also have a role to play in combating disease.
Furthermore, Bradford notes how a simple feed additive such as butyrate can now even affect the chemical composition of DNA, and so potentially can have life-long or even generational effects on animals.
The use of animal nutrition in this context is called ‘epigenetics’, and it uses elements in feed to encourage or suppress specific parts of an animals DNA. In this way farmers can develop some animal traits and discourage others. They can also influence how an animal reacts to illness, heat stress, or maybe even pregnancy.
Nutrition 2.0’s thinking is logical. It is based on the idea that the feed given to calves, chicks, and piglets give instructions to the animal on how to develop. In a sense the animals are ‘programmed by specific nutritional elements’ in the feed or feed additives.
As Cornell University outlines, “[Today], a variety of other mechanisms are now known to mediate nutrients’ effects on the animal, and these impacts don’t necessarily fit within the traditional paradigms. Nutrients can act by modulating the gut microbiome, by acting as cellular signals, by influencing a host of metabolic hormones, or through epigenetic mechanisms.”
What this means to livestock and poultry farmers is that feed additives which today are seen as too expensive may become financially viable through more effective application. A better understanding of the way nutrients work means that more expensive feed additives can be given for shorter and more focused periods of time.
It also means that feed nutritionists need to re-evaluate the effect of even the simplest feed raw materials. Now that butyrate is known to be more than a fuel, what about all the other ingredients?
In an insightful interview with the feed experts at Feed Navigator, Bradford stated, “The difficult thing is, you take [this knowledge] times hundreds and hundreds of nutrients, plus all the metabolites from those nutrients that are in the diet, and it becomes really kind of mind-boggling all the potential mechanisms you could lay out.”
Bradford further highlighted how Nutrition 2.0 is forcing feed nutritionists to rethink the way that they view feed additives. He said, “There are a lot of nutrients now where we’ve identified direct signalling effects on immune cells, which might lead us to say, ‘What if we supplement nutrient X during mastitis, would that help this cow resolve the infection quicker and get back to normal?’
It is questions like this that Bradford hopes will bring Nutrition 2.0 to the forefront of feed industry thinking. The answers will perhaps make us all think again.
You can watch Bradford’s interview and a further explanation of Nutrition 2.0 on the Feed Navigator website.
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