Efficacy evaluation of herbal preparations and antioxidants on the growth, immunity, antioxidant status and Escherichia coli counts of broilers under heat stress

Abstract

The present experiment was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of different herbal preparations on the performance of broilers. For this, 250-day-old male broiler chicks were randomly divided into 5 treatment groups with 10 replicates of 5 birds each. The experimental design consisted of T1: control diet, T2: Herbal powder I, T3: Herbal powder II, T4: Herbal powder III, T5: vit E and Se. The results indicated that T4 and T5 had significantly higher body weight gain compared to other treatments at 42 d of age. However, among other test diets, cumulative body weight gain was comparable with vit E and Se. Feed intake was not influenced by different herbal supplementation, but significantly better feed conversion ratio was noticed in all the test diets. Lipid peroxidation, alkaline phosphatase, blood urea nitrogen, cholesterol, blood glucose levels and E. coli counts in small intestine were significantly low in treatment groups compared to control and at par with vit E and Se. All herbal preparations did not have any significant effect on various carcass parameters, total protein, albumin and HI antibody titer. From the results, it could be concluded that poly herbal preparations improved the overall performance of broilers.

Effects of dietary stevia and ginger extracts on fattening performance, organ weights and serum biochemical parameters in quails exposed to heat stress

“…Similar results were reported in birds under HS, where dietary SGE addition also lowered serum glucose levels (Saeid et al, 2010;Wu et al, 2019;Khalifa et al, 2021), and that there was no interaction between environmental temperature and SGE (Rehman et al, 2019). In another study on HS stress, blood glucose levels in broilers fed herbal preparations were lower than in the control group (Rao et al, 2021). Regulation of glucagon secretion and blood sugar by the herbal mixture can be explained by increased insulin production and improved glucose tolerance, and thus lower blood sugar levels and carbohydrate absorption in birds (Chen et al, 2005).…”

Association Between Escherichia coli Load in the Gut and Body Weight Gain in Broiler Chickens: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Antibiotics have been widely used for controlling the disease; however, the emergence and spread of antibiotic-resistant E. coli strains (16), together with stricter international regulations on the use of antibiotics in food-producing animals have prompted a need for natural alternatives (17). Therefore, the global preference to use natural alternatives instead of antibiotics to treat and prevent intestinal infections has increased (18) and promoted research work to investigate the impact of selected probiotics, postbiotics, paraprobiotics, natural herbal compounds, and organic acids on body performance and the gut microbial community (19-23). In general, several feed supplements have been reported to have beneficial effects in improving broiler growth performance by increasing the daily body weight gain or total body weight or both in treated birds (24).…”