Digestion is described as the mechanical and chemical breakdown of food into metabolisable parts which can be used by the organism. In monogastric animals, including a wide variety of different fish species (ranging for instance from Salmon and trout via tilapia and seabass to Pangasius), the chemical breakdown is next to others achieved in the stomach through acidification. According to Wikiped...
Dear Mr. Rojas,
according to an old study from Herpol and van Grembergen (1967), chicken can reach a pH as low as 1.8 and 2.5 in Proventriculus and Gizzard respectively. Feeding poultry will certainly alter the pH in this region - to what extent depends on the diet (mineral, protein). How a different feeding frequency will affect the pH I am not able to say, but would speculate that a similar pattern as described in the article on fish may be expected. Thus, dietary acidifier may play a role in improving those conditions. They have been used in poultry as early as the 1980ies, with a growing number of studies since the last decade - partly triggered by the ban on AGP in Europe.
You may contact us on addcon.com; we are working in latin America and have staff located in Colombia. Maybe we could work out some trials together. Looking forward to hear from you.
Hi Christian, thank you for the interesting read, I am very new to this field so please excuse me if the questions are trivial. Would you then recommend continuous feeding with added acidifiers?
Side effects?
What about alternative proteins - fly larvae etc? Do you think they would induce the same buffering effect?
Hello Ryan, we are operating in South Africa as well - you may get in touch with us via info@addcon.com. To your questions... the difficulty in reaching a low pH after a single meal, as described in the article, was observed in juvenile fish. Similar pattern may be observed in piglets as well. There, the use of acidifiers is more or less standard. In fish, we have done long term studies with tilapia and pangasius (both over several months). We did not look only into the effect on pH... which will have a beneficial impact on protein digestibility, but also on the anti-bacterial effect of acidifier. The use of an acidifier depends a lot on the conditions on farm - protein level of feed, water quality, temperature etc. If the conditions are sub-optimal I would indeed suggest to use the acidifier continuously. Since organic acids are completely metabolizable you will not have any resistances or residues - and side effects have not been noticed. Regarding the proteins... well - in general it is the protein which buffers the acid, regardless what type. There may be changes in the different meals, but I have not seen any data yet. Might be worth looking into. But there will be still a very strong correlation between high protein content in a diet and a high buffer capacity.
Dear Dr. Ahmadhamza,
that depends on the animal species. Potassium diformate was developed for the swine market, and showed very promising results in aquaculture as well. Sodium diformate is meant for poultry. But since both molecules are diformates, the effects and their magnitude are comparable.
