Weaning is a major physiological and immunological crisis for piglets. This abrupt transition from sow’s milk to solid feeds causes a combination of stressors. For example, the small intestine undergoes severe villus atrophy, with villus height reducing by up to 75% within 24 hours. The tight junctions between gut cells weaken, increasing intestinal permeability. This allows toxins and pathogens to pass into the blood stream, triggering inflammation that diverts energy and nutrients away from the growth.
Soybean meal is good source of protein but contains trypsin inhibitors and other anti-nutritional factors, resulting the impaired digestion and the inflammation. It also contains large, complex proteins that are hard for weaned piglets to break down with their immature digestive systems. Nextide is the blend of soybean meal fermented by bacillus spp. bacteria (BF-SBM), functional amino acids and nucleotide. BF-SBM can reduce trypsin inhibitors to near zero and break down the major antigenic proteins (Figure 1). In BF-SBM, the complex protein is pre-digested into smaller peptides and free amino acids, which are much easier and faster for the piglet to absorb (Figure 2).
Figure 1. The effect of BF-SBM on protein-based anti-nutritional factors
Figure 2. The effect of BF-SBM on peptide (< 30 kDa) production (%)
Recently CJ conducted a 28 days of trial in Vietnam and results were published in Journal of Animal science (2024). The standard, positive control diet was formulated including 3% fish meal and 2% plasma protein. The negative control was not including animal proteins. The other four treatments used 5% Nxtide to replace 3% fish meal, 3% fish meal and 1% plasma protein, 2% plasma protein or 3% fish meal and 2% plasma protein, respectively. Adding 5% Nextide to replace 3% fish meal and 2% plasma protein significantly increased the daylit weight gain (Figure 3) probably due to increased villus height and reduced diarrhea rate (Figure 4).
Figure 3. The effect of Nextide on the body weight gain (g/d/head)
Figure 4. The effect of Nextide on Villus height (µm) and Diarrhea rate (%)