ISSUE FOCUS 30 FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE February 2024 INCORPORATE FEEDASE: THE GLOBAL FEED DIGESTIBILITY APPROACH Within poultry feed, 20 to 25% of the ingested feed fraction is indigested. This indigestible fraction of feed corresponds to compounds which are either totally or partially digested. Many reasons may explain a lower digestibility performance such as heat damage of the feed, passage rate of the digesta, lack of enzymatic activity, or the presence of anti-nutritional factors such as trypsin inhibitors, phytates or dietary fibers. Those anti-nutritional factors may inhibit endogenous enzymes activity, favor some nutrients bounding or increase digesta viscosity, thereby negatively affecting the digestibility of the feed. Knowing what fraction of nutrients is not digested and present antinutritional properties, and providing insights on the indigested compounds interaction in poultry feed is key for capturing the full value of exogenous enzymes. An internal study analyzing the effects of eight different anti-nutritional factors included at different levels in poultry diet, showed that for each percent of phytate present in the diet, the digestibility was decreasing by 0,48% as AMEn, thus decreasing the overall energy of the diet. Therefore, knowing the amount of non-digestible nutrients helps to evaluate the potential of exogenous enzyme response. As an example, dietary fibers act as anti-nutritional factors, hence need to be degraded or digested to eliminate their negative impact. However, there are many kinds of dietary fibers (arabinoxylans, xyloses, B-glucans etc…), and each of these substrates needs a specific enzyme to be degraded. Unfortunately, due to the complex interactions happening between the enzymes, the substrates, and the gut environment, we cannot claim a certain additive effect from the inclusion of several types of enzymes. For this reason, considering several exogenous enzymes as a unique enzyme solution, which breakdown the antinutritional fraction and releases nutrients from it, has demonstrated to be the best way to evaluate the feed digestibility improvement. This vision is described as the FEEDASE approach. FEEDASE is about considering the whole feed for a global enzymatic solution, resulting in an improvement of digestibility of all nutrients, including fat, starch, proteins, phosphorus, etc…. In other words, FEEDASE is composed of several
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