Effects of dietary supplementation with graded levels of omega-3 fatty acids on growth performance, nutrients digestibility, blood profile, faecal microbial in weaning pigs

Abstract

This experiment was conducted to determine effects of dietary supplementation with coated omega-3 fatty acids (n-3FA) on growth performance, nutrients digestibility, blood profile and faecal microflora in weaning pigs. A total of 200 weaning pigs with initial body weight (IBW, 6.97 ± 1.22 kg) were randomly assigned to four treatments: CON, basal diet; during phase 1, 2 and 3, 0.3FA, basal diet + 0.3%, 0.2%, 0.1% coated n-3FA; 0.6FA, basal diet + 0.6%, 0.4% 0.2% coated n-3FA; 0.9FA, basal diet + 0.9%, 0.6% and 0.3% coated n-3FA. When the graded level of n-3FA supplementation was added in the diet, a linearly increased average daily gain and gain/feed of the pig was observed in every phase (p < .05), the digestibility of dry matter (DM) was linearly increased, whereas nitrogen (N) digestibility showed a trend (p = .0594), the concentration of serum IgG (p = .0886) as well as the faecal lactobacillus count showed a linearly increase at the end of the experiment. However, there were no differences in the concentrations of serum haptoglobin and faecal microflora on among treatment. In conclusion, the coated n-3FA diet showed positive effects in improving growth performance, digestibility of DM and N in weaning pigs. Furthermore, it has a trend improvement on the count of lactobacillus in weaning pigs.