Research On Animal Production

This experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of dietary sesame oil contains natural antioxidant and/or α-tocopheryl acetate on growth performance, blood metabolites and small intestinal morphology of male broilers. A total of 100 Ross male broilers with 7 days of age, were randomly divided into four ditary treatments. Each diet was randomly fed to five replicates of 5 chicks each. The treatments including: a corn soybean meal based diet with added crude corn oil and without feed additive supplementation (negative control diet, NC), a NC diet with 250 mg of α-tocopheryl acetate/kg (positive control, PC) and two test diets, one with 50 and other with 100 percent of crude corn oil in NC diet replaced with sesame oil. Chicks fed with diet in which 50 percent of corn oil replaced with sesame oil, had the highest average daily gains (P<0.05). Sesame oil replacement in the diet had not any significant effect on feed intake and feed conversion ratios. Chicks fed with positive and negative control diets, had the highest and lowest dressing percentages, respectively (P<0.05). Replacing of sesame oil for corn oil in diet significantly increased the length, width and apical surface absorption as compared with those fed the negative control diet (P<0.05). Chickens fed diet containing 50 percent sesame oil had the lowest serum glucose and triglyceride concentrations (P<0.05).  Using of sesame oil in diet like supplementation with α-tocopheryl acetate could have positive effects on growth performance, blood metabolites concentrations and gastrointestinal health of young broiler chickens, due to its strong antioxidant compounds in first weeks of age.