Non-nutrients in swine health and production

Abstract Text:

Demand for animal proteins in the human food consumption is rising globally at an unprecedented rate. Swine products occupy an important position in the structure of animal proteins. Thus, the improvement of swine health in the future swine production systems will be critical to increase global food production. A group of health technologies have been applied to powerfully improve swine health and production, including age segregation, all-in/all-out pig flow, biosecurity measures, sanitation, vaccination and others. In addition, the regular use of antibiotics in pig diets has been proven to improve health and productive performance, as shown by volumes of scientific literature and decades of practical experience. Recently, a novel concept, non-nutrients, is illuminated to describe a group of dietary compounds, which has no nutrient contribution to animals, but have physiological activities beyond provision of bioavailable nutrients. Antibiotics is also counted to the category of non-nutrients. Emerging evidence suggested that these non-nutrients provided benefits on animal health and production through different modes of action: regulating nutrient digestibility or absorption, and modulating microbial ecology in the digestive tract and/or immune responses. For example, dietary supplementation of artificial sweeteners prevent enteric disorders and enhance the growth and performance of early weaned pigs by increasing the expression of the intestinal glucose transporter SGLT1 and glucose absorption. Different types of exogenous enzymes, such as, phytase, xylanases, proteases, etc. may be used in swine diets to improve nutrient digestibility of all stages of pigs when certain endogenous enzymes are insufficient. Interest is growing in the use of probiotics and/or prebiotics to increase the populations of desired microbes in the digestive tract, and thereby provide benefits on pig health and performance. They may achieve this goal either by continuous introducing the target microbes into the digestive tract or by providing substances that specifically favor the growth of the target microbes over competitors. Moreover, plant extracts can be additional tools that producers use to keep pigs healthy and reduce the impacts of disease. Dietary supplementation of certain plant extracts may enhance disease resistance of pigs by improving gut mucosal integrity and optimizing immune response. In the near future, the importance of using non-nutritional dietary components of maintaining pig health will be increased as such use of antibiotics will be progressively restricted in many countries.

Keywords:

health, non-nutrients, pigs