Effect of dietary sunflower meal, fish meal, and vitamin E on turkeys uninfected and infected with stunting syndrome

Abstract

<p>Experiments were conducted to determine whether feeding diets of different ingredient composition to poults could reduce severity of experimentally-induced stunting syndrome (SS). One-day-old poults were dosed per os with either saline or an inoculum of a homogenate prepared using intestines from SS-infected poults. Diets containing 14% sunflower meal (SFM) or 10% fish meal (FM) and two dietary concentrations of vitamin E (VE), 12 IU VE/kg of diet (LE) and 800 IU VE/kg of diet (HE) were evaluated with uninfected (UI) and infected (I) poults in 21-day experiments, starting at 1 day of age. SS depressed (P <.01) body weight (BW) from 5 to 21 days of age in all experiments, and impaired feed efficiency (FE) until 9 days of age, irrespective of treatments. Feeding either FM or SFM improved (P <.05) BW up to 5 and 13 days of age, respectively, in both UI and I poults. Poults fed FM or SFM had better (P <.01) FE from 1 to 5 and 9 to 13 days of age. HE increased (P <.05) BW of poults from 9 to 21 days of age, however, HE did not improve FE at any age. SS increased (P <.05) liver [alpha]-tocopherol concentration in the first experiment. In the second experiment, however, there was no effect of SS on liver [alpha]-tocopherol but plasma [alpha]-tocopherol concentration decreased (P <.05). HE increased (P <.01) the concentrations of [alpha]-tocopherol in liver and plasma at all ages. Similarly, HE increased the concentration of [alpha]-tocopherol in the very low density lipoprotein (VLDL) and low density lipoprotein (LDL) fractions from 5 days and that of the high density lipoprotein (HDL) from 9 days of age until 21 days. These effects were consistent, irrespective of type of inoculation or diet, in overcoming the usual early posthatching depletion suffered by the young poults when LE was fed.</p>