Poultry and pig nutrition: meat quality and metabolic disorders

For several decades, the main concern of nutritionists has been to meet the growing nutritional requirements of poultry and pigs resulting from the great advances in genetics. Parallel to the focus on nutritional requirements for maximum performance, more recently there has been an interest in nutritionally altering the quantitative and qualitative composition of carcasses. With the high level of genetic selection in broilers, the new commercial strains have muscles with twice as many muscle fibres and a larger diameter than the traditional strains. However, all this genetic progress in broiler performance has generated an adverse side effect, which is the emergence of metabolic diseases especially related to the breast muscles, such as deep breast myopathy or PSE meat. On the other hand, one of the most fascinating aspects of pork is that it can be enriched nutritionally. That's why this book also discusses how to fulfil the nutritional needs of humans through the nutritional management of pigs.