The Impact of Nutrition on Swine Gastrointestinal Tract Health and Microbiota

Dear Colleagues,

Nowadays, the use of in-feed antibiotics is increasingly restricted, while research efforts aimed at studying dietary factors that can protect the intestine from the harmful effects of weaning stress and of massive production systems need to be increased. Nutrition can modulate the main non-immune defense mechanisms of the digestive system, the evolution of the local immune system of the weaning pig and the nutritional factors involved. A proper diet is also expected to rapidly consolidate the establishment of a mature community of microorganisms in the different digestive tracts of pigs. This also concerns the provision of feeds to the suckling piglet. There is also the need to complement basic nutritional knowledge with practical dietary guidelines to continuously maintain porcine gut health and beneficial coexistence between the gut microbiota and the host. Furthermore, it is also necessary to improve knowledge on the best feeding practices to optimize the health in the different digestive tracts that are interconnected but may also express different nutritional needs. This may be particularly for protein and carbohydrate fractions with different digestibility for the host and availability for the gut microbiota. Finally, there is still a market to develop reliable feeding additives to control swine gastrointestinal tract health and microbiota.

Prof. Paolo Bosi
Guest Editor

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