ESSENTIAL OILS ARE VALUABLE PARTNER AGAINST HEAT STRESS

Throughout our animals’ life, they are often exposed to different situations or factors that cause stress as transport, changes in the feed, weaning, and environmental factors, among other. One of the situations that cause stress in all animals is when they are exposed to high temperatures resulting in the well-known heat stress.

Animals suffer from heat stress when they can not counteract the thermal loads to which they are subjected (Bernabucci et al., 2010). This stress or exposure compromises the homeostasis of our animals. This involves physiological changes in the animals to regulate their body temperature. All these factors suffered by the animal have prejudicial consequences for the gastrointestinal tract (Lian et al., 2020) and digestive (Mullin et al., 2009) between other impacts, such as decreased performance, intake, and so on.

If we analyse the animal’s physiological response to heat stress, we can see that one of the heat stress consequences is TEER reduction (transepithelial electrical resistance). Resulting in a hyper-permeability of the epithelium, which makes animals more susceptible to endotoxin damage (Xiao et al., 2013), released when Gram-negative bacteria die and their cell wall disintegrates.

Essential oils play an important role at this moment in mitigating the consequences of heat stress. Thanks to their antibacterial capacity against Gram-negative bacteria, they reduce the possibility of endotoxin formation. In the different studies published by Norel, we see how the synergistic combination of essential oils (EO-FIT) can have a bactericidal effect against pathogenic Gram – bacteria. Although essential oils are not the solution to heat stress, they can be an ally to reduce the negative impacts of heat stress on animal health.