PARTNER FEATURE ▶▶▶
Zinc oxide: Suppression or better supplementation?
The year 2022 marks a change in the usage of zinc in the European Union – pharmacological levels of zinc oxide can no longer be given to just-weaned piglets. However, that does not mean that zinc is entirely off the table. Can it be provided in smarter ways?
BY AGATHE ROMÉO, R&D MANAGER AND JENNIFER MAURIN, MARKETING & SALES DIRECTOR, ANIMINE
T
Feed intake & Digestion
Immune system
he ban of pharmacological usage of zinc oxide (ZnO) has arrived in Europe. For more than 30 years, pharmacological levels of ZnO have been widely used with no doubt about its efficacy, although
there is still no clear consensus on the mode of action by which ZnO is able to control diarrhoea in pigs so efficiently. That may be because ZnO has a multitude of pathways to im- prove the animals’ gut health and control the proliferation of pathogenic bacteria (see Figure 1).
Zero zinc diets First of all, zinc is an essential nutrient, playing an important role in the body, such as modulation of the immune system, antioxidant mechanisms and paracellular permeability. Zinc
Figure 1 – The polyvalent mode of action of zinc oxide in piglets. Zn status &
Nutritional interactions
deficiency can lead to a reduction in feed intake, increase of paracellular permeability, weakness of the immune system, etc. In other words, no feeding strategy should be entirely void of zinc, as the mineral absolutely needs to be supplied. In addition to the correct supply of zinc in diets, weaned pig- lets have low and variable feed intake, which can lead to low ingestion of the nutrient. Those factors combined lead to the limited storage of zinc in the pig’s body and may lead to a transient deficiency for a few days post-weaning. Yet not all zinc sources are created equal. The regulatory pres- sure to reduce the use of pharmacological levels of ZnO raised the question of the difference between the sources. For example, why supply 3,000 ppm? Couldn’t that be less? At Animine, those questions led to a series of trials looking into the physicochemical properties of the various sources and their behaviour in the animal’s gut.
European research programme With the goal of better understanding the mode of action of ZnO, the programme Zinc0Supp was set up, involving several universities and addressing the suppression of pharmaco- logical levels of ZnO. The study of the supplementation of a potentiated zinc source (HiZox by Animine) formed part of that research. The programme is expected to yield more information, but some preliminary results are described here.
Secretion ZINC OXIDE
Microbiota modulation
Intestinal integrity
Source: Courtesy of Bologna University, Italy.
Oxidative stress
Dose-response of zinc in weaned piglets A trial performed in 2021 at a commercial facility, supervised by the Free University of Berlin, Germany, compared the performance effects of supplementing either standard ZnO or the potentiated zinc at 150, 300, 600, 900 and 1,500 ppm. The results (see Figure 2) showed no effect on average daily gain (ADG) and feed intake up to 600 ppm of standard ZnO and only at 900 ppm a significant dose response to ZnO supplementation is observed, up to 1,500 ppm. The potentiated zinc, however, showed improvements compared to standard ZnO already at 150 ppm, increasing the ADG by 10% and feed intake by 9% in piglets. The dose response of the potentiated zinc improved at every dose, reaching a plateau at 300 ppm of supplementation. The experiment confirmed that zinc sources are not the same, and selecting the right source allows reduction of the amount included while sustaining performance.
54 ▶ PIG PROGRESS | Volume 38, No. 3, 2022
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