Dr. Tim Goossens, Business Development Manager Digestive Performance with Nutriad, was one of the speakers.

 

Several topics were covered, including vaccination against PED, immune function, microbial activity and probiotics. "The feedback from the audience was excellent," said Alex Eggen, the chairman of the conference. "The attendees especially liked the variety in subjects that were brought forward; the topics were distinct, but also all interrelated."

 

Dr. Goossens presented a talk entitled "Improving gut performance in health and disease: the challenge to develop a broad-spectrum feed additive". In his presentation, he addressed his view on the challenges that producers of gut health promoting additives are facing.

 

More specifically, he discussed how livestock producers are becoming more familiar with these type of additives, and how they tend to try to identify "the best one", often to be used as an alternative to AGPs (Antimicrobial Growth Promoters).

 

Tim Goossens explained: "By now, it is clear that many active ingredients can be linked to gut health. But to develop a product that is just a robust as AGPs, their potential needs to be maximised." He talked about butyrate as an example. "Butyrate has the potential to trigger several physiological responses that are beneficial for gut health and performance. But that potential will only be met, if you invest in a coating that can deliver butyrate throughout the entire digestive tract, as we do for our ADIMIX^®Precision".

 

He advocated that optimising the effectiveness of active ingredients is crucial to meet the customer's expectations about AGPs. "Only when their effectiveness is enhanced, active compounds that promote gut health will be able to match the robustness of AGPs. That is, being able to offer benefits for livestock producers, no matter whether they are raising animals in optimal conditions, or whether their animals are facing intestinal challenges," he argued.

 

More highlights of Nutriad's activities at VIV Asia 2017 can be viewed at /contents/03-28-2017/62dd49c0-b4a4-48c5-bbe1-84478c186960-a181.html