Effect of Unheated Soybean Meal on Blood Coagulation of Chicks

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONBALLOUN and Johnson (1953) reported that the feeding of unheated, solvent-extracted soybean meal significantly increased blood-clotting time of chicks, and that vitamin K did not affect this condition. During the course of an experiment devised to investigate the methionine requirement of growing chicks fed meals heated for various lengths of time (Griminger et al., 1954) we subjected a number of chicks from each lot to blood-clotting tests, and found no such differences; these diets contained ample amounts of vitamin K. In another preliminary experiment chicks were fed a ration which had been employed by Griminger et al. (1953) to produce a vitamin K deficiency in young chicks. This diet was modified by replacing the commercial soybean meal sample with a desolventized meal (“raw grits”) that had undergone a minimum of heat treatment during extraction, or by samples of meal heated for 45 and 90 minutes respectively at atmospheric pressure… .