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Record W4410535981 · doi:10.1093/jas/skaf102.203

267 Effect of dietary cereal β-glucan on digestive physiology, gut health, and growth in pigs

2025· article· en· W4410535981 on OpenAlexaffabout
R. T. Zijlstra

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Animal Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldAgricultural and Biological Sciences
TopicAnimal Nutrition and Physiology
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBiologyFood sciencePhysiologyDigestive tractMedicineInternal medicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract To manage gut health in pigs, dietary β-glucans from small grains have been explored for their functional characteristics. The Canadian Prairies and Northern Great Plains in the USA are prime production areas for small grains. Of these grains, barley and oats have the greatest content of β-glucan that have a linear structure with β-(1→4) and β-(1→3) linkages. These grains can thus be used as dietary sources of cereal β-glucans. Using crop breeding, grain cultivars with enhanced content of β-glucan have been developed. Cereal β-glucans can also be fractionated from the grain matrix using dry or wet fractionation resulting in β-glucan concentrates. Historically, cereal β-glucans were classified as soluble fiber and regarded as anti-nutritional factor. Consequently, β-glucanases were developed for feed supplementation and added to swine diets to increase growth performance, especially for young pigs. More recently, barley grain replaced wheat in diets formulated to equal net energy and standardized ileal digestible amino acid content and fed to young pigs. Under those conditions, feeding barley-based diets fed to nursery pigs did not reduce feed intake, gain, or gain-to-feed, indicating that cereal β-glucans do not reduce growth performance, with occasionally an advantage to feeding barley-based diets. Cereal β-glucans are now classified as fermentable fiber and the extent of viscosity generated will depend partly on its molecular weight. Feeding concentrated cereal β-glucan to pigs will increase digesta viscosity in the stomach that will delay gastric emptying and thereby reduce peak net portal appearance of glucose that will be absorbed following digestion of dietary starch. Cereal β-glucan may inhibit reabsorption of bile salts thereby increasing their neo-synthesis that may reduce plasma cholesterol. Finally, the main reason for including cereal β-glucans in diets for young pigs is their prebiotic activity by serving a fermentable carbohydrate. Cereal β-glucans are associated with increased short-chain fatty acid production in the gut, increased Bifidobacteria and Lactobacillus that are associated with enhanced gut health and may decrease enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli adherence to enterocytes. In conclusion, dietary cereal β-glucans can modulate digestive physiology in pigs and thereby enhance gut health of pigs, without directly affective growth performance of pigs.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.002
Threshold uncertainty score0.007

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.015
GPT teacher head0.281
Teacher spread0.266 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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