GUSTOR N'RGY compensates for reduced energy and protein concentration in broiler diets.

The successive crises affecting the world economy in recent years have had a particularly serious impact on the raw materials needed by agriculture. For this reason, livestock productions are suffering from the rising price of products such as cereals or soya, challenging nutricionists to produce at the most efficient cost. There are numerous additives that have a positive effect on the gastrointestinal tract that can contribute to this purpose, including sodium butyrate, which has an improving effect on intestinal morphology (Chamba et al., 2014) and intestinal microbiota (Bortoluzzi et al., 2017).

The success of the use of these products, including GUSTOR N'RGY, suggests that their use could compensate for a reduction in the concentration of nutrients in feed formulation, considerably reducing costs. This hypothesis was confirmed in trials published by Mallo et al. (2021). In four trials, they reduced the energy (ME) and amino acid (AA) concentrations of different broiler diets and tested whether the reduction in performance can be counteracted by GUSTOR N'RGY supplementation. Two reductions were performed: R1, of 60 kcal/kg and 2.3% AA relative to the control diet (C) and R2, of 120 kcal/kg and 4.6% AA relative to C. For each of these diets there was one group of broilers supplemented with 1kg/t GUSTOR N'RGY per tonne of feed (PSB) and one unsupplemented group. Therefore, 6 treatments were carried out: C, C+PSB, R1, R1+PSB, R2, R2+PSB.

Trials 2 and 4 showed that reducing nutrient concentration decreased broiler performance (Final weight in trial 4: 2.81 kg and 2.68 kg for C and R1 respectively, P = 0.003). Furthermore, in all trials, animals supplemented with GUSTOR N'RGY improved their performance (final weight or feed conversion ratio). For example, in trials 1 and 4, animals receiving R1 reduction and supplementation showed similar final weights to those receiving diet C without supplementation (P = 0.024 for trial 1 and P = 0.003 for trial 4).

The authors attributed these results to two reasons. Firstly, supplementation with sodium butyrate has been shown to improve nutrient absorption in animals (Guilloteau et al., 2010), which was confirmed by the observation of improved gross energy metabolizability (69.94% vs. 72.55%, P = 0.02). On the other hand, as already seen in Bortoluzzi et al. (2017), the change in bacterial populations caused by nutrient depletion is reduced by the addition of sodium butyrate, one of the consequences being the change in the volatile fatty acid profile, which was also observed in the study.

The conclusion of this study is that the hypothesis that GUSTOR N'RGY supplementation counteracts the negative effects of nutrient-depleted diets was confirmed.