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Major dietary sources of oxidative stress and inflammation

In the post-antibiotic era we experience today, the key concept in feeding all young farm animals remains “gut health.”

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Denfotoblog, Bigstock.com

In the post-antibiotic era we experience today, the key concept in feeding all young farm animals remains “gut health.” With that, we usually imply improving gut health in an effort to negate the need for antibiotics, either for growth promotion or even for prophylaxis and therapy. In fact, there is a recent trend to avoid using antibiotics even when animals get sick, in which case maintaining animals’ health becomes even more important than having them perform efficiently. Thus, gut health remains the focus of much research and commercial effort worldwide.

What we tend to forget, however, is that we often create unnecessary gut distress by feeding the wrong diet, or rather by using the wrong ingredients. Such is the case when ingredients cause either outright increased oxidative stress or inflammation that also leads to oxidative stress. The latter case is difficult to appreciate, but ingredients that induce inflammation also lead indirectly to oxidative stress, which creates a vicious cycle where oxidation causes more inflammation and so on. At the end, gut inflammation from dietary causes can be as damaging as inflammation caused by chronic subclinical infections by pathogens. This is because the result is the same: loss of appetite, gut infrastructure damage, reduced performance, diarrhea, and even death due to secondary complications from opportunistic microorganisms.

To this end, it is important to recognize which ingredients, or types of ingredients, can cause the most damage, in terms of gut inflammation. Here, we will focus on two major sources of this distress, namely the sources of lipids (fats and oils) and vegetable proteins. The first group increases oxidative stress from the onset, whereas the second group leads to autoimmune allergenic reactions causing oxidative stress through chronic gut inflammation.