Improving the overall digestibility of feeds to decrease their costs per kg of liveweight

Cereals and oilseeds, which provide nutrients at a reasonable cost for animal production, are the main macro ingredients of feeds. However, they also contain several anti-nutritional factors (ANF) and indigestible substrates that degrade the performance of animals. These ANFs negatively impact the cost of proteins for animals, such as broilers. Providing information on the indigestible components of feeds, for example, phytates and specific types of dietary fiber, and on their interaction in poultry feeds is key to capturing the value of exogenous enzymes, to alleviate the negative impact of these ANFs. In order to estimate the potential of enzymes in animal diets, nutritionists first need to know what fraction of the nutrients is not digested. As enzymes turn part of indigestible nutrients into digestible ones, knowing the amount of indigestible nutrients in a feed makes it easier to evaluate the potential of the enzymes response. It has been demonstrated that the best way of evaluating improvements in feed digestibility is to consider several exogenous enzymes as a unique enzyme solution, which acts on a part of a unique digestion process that attacks the indigestible dietary fraction and releases nutrients from it. This approach is known as the Feedase approach. Feedase involves considering the whole feed as a substrate of a global enzymatic solution, which results in an improvement of the digestibility of all the nutrients, including fat, starch, proteins, phosphorus, etc… Through this new approach, the effects of the enzymes are no longer only linked to a specific nutrient, but to the indigestible dietary fraction, which is reduced because of the complementary actions of enzymes.