Freeze-dried elements enable pet meals manufacturers to supply uncooked meat merchandise with out the necessity for refrigeration. For practically a decade, Petfood Business has reported on the steadily rising recognition of freeze-dried canine, cat and different pet meals. But in all that point, few scientists have examined the digestibility of freeze-dried pet meals. Researchers on the College of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in america and the College of Guelph in Canada collaborated to look at how nicely canine can digest the amino acids in freeze-dried merchandise. Amino acids are the constructing blocks of proteins.
The researchers examined three codecs of freeze-dried canine meals: conventional freeze-dried nuggets, low-temperature freeze-dried nuggets and a hybrid freeze-dried nugget. Primal Pet Meals supplied the canine meals. The scientists used the precision-fed cecectomized rooster assay to check amino acid digestibility. The assay entails a surgical process, much like a human appendectomy, that turns roosters into an efficient, environment friendly mannequin for canine’ and cats’ digestive methods.
Freeze-dried pet food experiment
Within the experiment, twelve cecectomized roosters ate one of many three freeze-dried pet food codecs together with corn. The scientists analyzed the birds’ urine and feces to find out how nicely that they had digested the amino acids within the pet food.
“There have been no important variations in standardized amino acid digestibilities amongst diets, with digestibilities being excessive for all examined,” wrote the researchers within the Journal of Animal Science.
Contemplating these amino acids that canine’ our bodies can’t synthesize, digestibilities exceeded 90% for all diets (arginine: 94.1%-95.6%; isoleucine: 91.2%-93.1%; leucine: 92.4%-95.3%; methionine: 92.8%-94.9%; phenylalanine: 90.8%-93.6%; tryptophan: 96.2%-98.6%; valine: 90.2%-92.9%).
Nonetheless, histidine, lysine, and threonine have been decrease with digestibilities starting from 81.7%-86.6%, 86.7%-91.7%, and 89.6%-91.7%, respectively.
The freeze-dried canine meals additionally confirmed little proof of warmth injury from processing. The scientists decided this by measuring the ratio of forms of lysine within the nuggets.
“Normally, the low-temperature nugget had the best numerical AA digestibilities, doubtless as a consequence of lowered warmth injury, however all diets carried out very nicely,” the scientists wrote.
