“Leaky Gut Syndrome”: The story behind a bad performance

The intestinal barrier is mainly constituted by a single layer of epithelial cells, including enterocytes, goblet cells, paneth cells, and enteroendocrine cells, and also immune cells. The cohesion between these cells and thus, the regulation of the intestinal permeability is ensured by a dynamic protein complex called tight junctions. The interaction between its physical, physiological and immunological components enables a balanced permeability, providing an effective defense to macromolecules, bacterial products, and food antigens, but allowing a small percentage of molecules to cross the tight junctions and the co-existence with the intestinal microbiota without causing any harm.

Several factors including stress and inflammation have been identified to breakdown the intestinal barrier, thus increasing intestinal permeability and allowing the entry of macromolecules and endotoxins, which causes the activation of the immune system. Moreover, the inflammation associated with stress such as weaning, is known to have deleterious effects on the intestinal morphology. Furthermore, the subsequent immune response suppresses appetite and redirects energy and nutrients towards the immune response and away from production purposes. An activated immune system requires a large amount of energy that could be used for growth otherwise.

Therefore, there is an obvious need for developing strategies to minimize productivity losses when physiological states or environmental conditions activate the immune system.

Effective management and feeding strategies to promote gut health or limit intestinal inflammation are essential to improve growth performance and ensure the profitability of the animal production system.

Several studies have demonstrated the anti-inflammatory effect of Sangrovit®, which in turn helps improving the intestinal barrier function and decreases the need of energy and nutrients for mounting an immune response. Consequently, more nutrients are available for growth and production when a healthy gut is maintained.

Moreover, supplementing pigs with Sangrovit® has shown to down-regulate stress response, thus reducing the negative effect of stress on the intestinal mucosa.

Sangrovit® supplementation increased the resistance of the intestinal mucosa by 47% (Robbins et al., 2013), as a result of less inflammation (Fig. 1). Additionally, a recent research study showed that Sangrovit® supplementation increased the expression of tight junction proteins, which is indicative of an improved intestinal barrier function in pigs receiving Sangrovit® (Liu et al., 2016; Fig. 2). All together, this data strongly supports the use of Sangrovit® as a nutritional strategy to improve gut health and prevent the occurrence of a “leaky gut”, thus maximizing the use of nutrients for performance in an more efficient manner.

• “Leaky gut” is associated with poor performance and disease.

• Stress and inflammation are well-known triggers of intestinal barrier dysfunction and the occurrence of “leaky gut”.

• Sangrovit® down-regulates inflammation and stress, thus improving intestinal barrier function, reducing the energetic cost for the immune system and improving performance.