The effect of PHA-lectins and diet composition on performance and intestinal development in weaning piglets

Anti-nutritional factors such as PHA-lectins (phytohaemagglutinin) in piglet diets can compromise piglet's performance and health by gut damage, which is especially important at weaning. Two trials were conducted to investigate the effect of PHA and fermentable carbohydrates on performance, gut morphology, physiology and microbiology in piglets weaned at 26 days.

We studied dietary PHA as a model to standardize gut damage and its effect on intestinal morphology and microbiology in piglets until 2 weeks post weaning. In general, significant lower values were observed on day 7 compared to day 14 post weaning (d7 vs. d14: 358 vs. 442 μm villus height; 42.1 vs. 108.7 U/g protein sucrase-isomaltase), indicating gut maturation. We observed very few changes between day of weaning to day 7 post weaning, lactobacilli counts being most affected (8.9, 6.9, 7.4 cfu/g for d0, d7, d14). Apart from these marked time effects the effect of PHA was negligible and thus a less suitable model to standardize gut damage in this setup.

Furthermore we studied the effect of PHA in combination with rapid or slow fermentable carbohydrates (CHO) on performance and physiological parameters. We observed a dramatic effect on performance (ADG g/d: 245 no PHA + low CHO, 111 PHA + low CHO, 132 PHA + rapid CHO, 105 PHA + slow CHO), which was less clearly reflected in the physiological parameters.