The Effect of Including Capsaicin and Gut Microbiota Feed Additives on Growth Performance of Nursery Pigs

Abstract

Feed additives such as capsaicin, prebiotics, and microbiota feed additives can increase postweaning growth performance of pigs while decreasing antibiotic use. Therefore, we conducted two experiments to evaluate the growth performance of newly weaned pigs fed capsaicin, prebiotics, and microbiota feed additives. On the first experiment, we observed that feeding Capsaicin to sows during lactation and the corresponding offspring during weaning was more effective at increasing feed efficiency of weaning pigs than feeding Capsaicin only in lactation or only to nursery pigs. Likewise, there was a greater number of genes differentially expressed when sows and their offspring consumed Capsaicin than feeding to sows or nursery pigs alone. On the second experiment, we observed that the offspring of multiparous sows had greater post-weaning growth performance than those of primiparous sows and that feeding four different microbial feed additives did not increase the growth performance of the offspring of either group of sows.