ISSUE FOCUS FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE October 2024 39 many challenges in the animal industry, the underlying cause is an impaired gut integrity. Hence, protecting a healthy gut barrier should be a priority before you try to steer or modify the gut microbiome. Furthermore, every individual animal or subspecies has its specific gut microbiome, while the intestinal structure is similar. Hence it is complicated to steer the gut microbiome of the entire flock or herd towards the same optimal outcome. To elaborate on the importance of gut integrity, let’s highlight two important challenges in animal husbandry. Firstly, weaning is a crucial step in the life of pigs. They are removed from the sow, put in a new group and given solid feed for the first time. This is highly stressful and leads to intestinal dysbiosis and post-weaning diarrhea in the first days after weaning. Stress lowers feed intake, stomach acid production and triggers inflammation. Piglets need to eat to stimulate stomach functioning and digestive enzyme production. Hence stress after weaning lowers nutrient digestion and especially protein digestion. Next, undigested protein can be fermented in the hindgut leading to pathogenic growth, i.e. ETEC, and diarrheal incidence. In other words, insufficient protein digestion is usually the triggering factor for post-weaning diarrhea. Consequently, improving gut functioning and increasing feed intake as soon as possible after weaning is crucial to overcome this challenge. Secondly, heat stress is an environmental stressor that has an impact on gut health by inflammation and lowering gut integrity. On the one hand, the stress response results in pro-inflammatory signals that cause intestinal damage. On the other hand, the lower blood flow to internal organs increases oxidative stress and results in ROS formation. This leads to the destruction of tight junction proteins and a leaky gut. Moreover, heat stress decreases the antioxidant response in other animal body cells (e.g. liver), including decreased expression of antioxidant enzymes. In conclusion, the impact of heat stress on gut health can be lowered by improving gut integrity and lowering oxidative stress in the intestinal tract. HOW NUTRITION INFLUENCES GUT INTEGRITY Gut integrity is heavily influenced by animal nutrition. Especially in modern farm practices, the root cause of intestinal disorders is via suboptimal feed formulations. Local economic challenges put a lot of pressure on least-cost formulations resulting in substitutions of high-quality ingredients with local and cheaper byproducts. This comes with a risk of nutrient digestion, antinutritional factors and/or external factors like micro-organisms and mycotoxins. These risks can impair the integrity of the gut, by generating inflammation and destroying the tight junction proteins. Hence optimizing feed formulations for protein, fat and starch digestibility and monitoring antinutritional factors and mycotoxins are essential. Apart from the formulation, the budget for supplementing feed additives might also be limited. Unfortunately, intestinal health is such a wide topic that a lot of feed additives claim intestinal health benefits. Therefore, it is not easy for nutritionists to compare one with another. A wide range of additives, i.e. essential oils, probiotics, prebiotics, focus on antibacterial effectivity or steering the gut microbiome to control common gut health problems. However, there are only a few options that target gut integrity directly, i.e. SCFA, like butyric acid, antioxidants, functional amino acids and certain minerals, like zinc. From this selection, butyric acid is most interesting as this SCFA has an influence on all aspects of the gut barrier. Hereby,
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