COMPARATIVE UTILIZATION OF COOKED SOYBEANS AND FISHMEAL-GROUNDNUT CAKE MIXTURE IN DIETS

Abstract

A 4 week experiment involving 45 growing albino rats was carried out to assess the nutritional utilization of cooked full-fat soybean (CFFS) as a major source of dietary protein relative to that of the protein concentrates fishmeal-groundnut cake mixture and the response to supplementation of the cooked soybeans with 2g DL-methionine/kg diet and/or 2g L-lysine/kg diet. Feed intake (FI), average daily weight gain (DLG),. feed conversion ratio (FCR), protein efficiency ratio (PER) and feed cost (FC) per unit live-weight gain, (FC/WG) were measured, No significant effect of the various dietary treatments was observed on PER and FCIWG. However, the incorporation of CFFS either alone or in conjunction with either of both lysine and methionine significantly improved Fl and FCR (P< 0.05) and also DLG (P< 0.01) over the control fish-groundnut meal ration. Supplementation of CFFS with lysine either alone or along with methionine appeared unwarranted as methionine supplementation alone resulted in similar or slightly better efficiency of protein (0.247) and overall feed (0.596) utilization. From the results obtained, it appears that maize-based CFFS diet supplemented with 2 g/kg DL-methionine may be applicable for lion- ruminant feeding. However, since this level of methionine supplementation only provides for 67% of rat requirement, it is suggested that further studies with higher methionine levels be conducted.