Meating expectations

By Ricardo Gobbi, Evonik Degussa GmbH

Dr Ricardo Gobbi explains the breakthrough innovation that is supporting sustainable meat production.

“Physiological research and animal trials have shown that supplementation of GAA can act as a source of creatine particularly with such diets low in animal protein content or without any animal protein, significantly and consistently improving the efficiency in animal production.”
-Ricardo Gobbi, Evonik Degussa GmbH

One of the big challenges for this century is to produce food for the growing world with the available limited resources. The demand for meat products will strengthen in parallel with the rising population and the increasing incomes of a large fraction of the world's population.

Nutrition of farm animals has contributed greatly, over the past decades, to improve efficiency in meat production. Optimisation in production efficiency plays a central role in balancing increasing demand for food and feed with reasonable pressure on land, biodiversity and water resources.

Currently, researchers around the world are searching for the future solutions in feed formulations that will allow full expression of the genetic potential of pigs, poultry, cattle and fish to convert feed into protein for human nutrition in the form of meat, eggs and milk.

The feed industry is playing an important role in shaping the future by supporting investigations in basic science. Breakthroughs in basic science are fundamental to making major advances in animal production.

An interesting example of this contribution is the discovery by design in a hypothesis-driven research with guanidinoacetic acid (GAA). Eight years ago, entrepreneurs, supported by visionary feed industry managers, raised a hypothesis on the conditional necessity of GAA for high yield farm animals due its involvement in the energy metabolism. This hypothesis has been investigated by a network of research institutes in Europe, the US and Brazil.

Background for such an idea was the observation that use of alternative protein sources other than animal protein for feed formulation is steadily increasing in livestock production. As those protein sources often do not match the nutritional needs of specific livestock and poultry, there are efforts to provide ingredients that close the nutritional gaps of animal diets with lesser or no animal protein.

One of those affected nutrients is creatine. The only physiological precursor of creatine is GAA, which has much more favourable chemical and physiological properties compared to its metabolic derivative creatine and accordingly is more suitable for use in animal nutrition.

The animal's physiological demand for GAA and creatine can be supplied directly by creatine from fish or meat in the animal diet or by endogenous synthesis from the amino acids arginine and glycine to form GAA in the kidneys, which is later methylated in the liver to form creatine. Traditionally, metabolic synthesis and feeding proteins of animal origin provided an adequate supply. Diets with reduced amounts of animal protein or without any animal protein are deficient in creatine and this cannot fully be compensated for by de novo synthesis.

Physiological research and animal trials have shown that supplementation of GAA can act as a source of creatine particularly with such diets low in animal protein content or without any animal protein, significantly and consistently improving the efficiency in animal production. This improved efficiency is achieved through better feed conversion (less feed needed to produce same amount of meat), higher daily weight gain (faster growth rate) and benefits in carcass composition (more meat especially breast meat).

The crown of this achievement was the recognition of the European Food and Safety Authority (EFSA) on the efficacy and safety of GAA and later acceptance and publication by the European Commission of the authorisation regulation giving to GAA the status of nutritional feed additive in October 2009.

GAA is now offered commercially in Europe with the trademark CreAMINO being a granulated preparation of guanidinoacetic acid to match the handling needs of the feed industry as a dust free and free flowing product.

Adoption of this new nutritional concept by feed manufacturers and animal producers will contribute to an improvement in the sustainability of animal production particularly by improving animal efficiency and consequently lowering production costs and pressure on resources and environment.