Abstract
Although there are many studies on the importance of fatty acids (FA) in our diet and on the influence of dairy diets on FA metabolism, only a few investigate their predictive capacity to discriminate the type, amount and conservation method of farm forages. This research quantifies differences in milk FA concentrations and, using a supervised factorial discriminant analysis, assesses potential biomarkers when replacing maize with other silages, grass/lucerne hays or fresh grass. The statistical modelling identified three main clusters of milk FA profiles associated with silages, hays and fresh grass as dominant roughages. The main implication of a dairy cow feeding system based on poliphytic forages from permanent meadows is enhancing milk’s nutritional quality due to an increase in beneficial omega-3 polyunsaturated FA, conjugated linoleic acids and odd chain FA, compared to feeding maize silage. The study also identified a small but powerful and reliable pool of milk FA that can act as biomarkers to authenticate feeding systems: C16:1 c-9, C17:0, C18:0, C18:3 c-9, c-12, c-15, C18:1 c-9, C18:1 t-11 and C20:0.
Highlights
There are many studies on the importance of fatty acids (FA) in our diet and on the influence of dairy diets on FA metabolism, only a few investigate their predictive capacity to discriminate the type, amount and conservation method of farm forages
Despite a relatively high proportion of FA thought to have a negative impact on health, research suggests milk consumption has a positive health effect, thanks to short chain (≤ C10) FA (SCFA), conjugated linoleic acids (CLA), omega-3 (n-3) polyunsaturated FA (PUFA) and odd- and branched-chain FA (OCFA and BCFA)[1,4,5]
feeding groups (FG) are reported in Table 1 showing major differences in herd size—farms using maize silage milked more cows than farms feeding dried or fresh grass/legume forage
Summary
There are many studies on the importance of fatty acids (FA) in our diet and on the influence of dairy diets on FA metabolism, only a few investigate their predictive capacity to discriminate the type, amount and conservation method of farm forages. Many studies report the impact of dairy feeding on milk FA composition from intensive lowland production[9,12,13] Under these systems, cows fed forage from diverse meadows produce milk which is richer in beneficial FA such as CLA and n-3 compared with maize silage diets. Increasing the proportion of fresh or ensiled poliphytic (mixed or diverse) forages in dairy diets leads to significantly more n-3 and CLA as well as vaccenic acid (VA, C18:1 t-11), even if cows are housed and fed a total mixed ration (TMR)[9,12] This extensive knowledge on the influence of forages on bovine FA metobolism, has generated an interest and perspective on the potential application of multifactorial models to link milk FA and the botanical origin, conservation method and dietary proportion of forages[9,18]. A linear regression model and clustering of the variability by a set of descriptive statistics were performed to predict milk FA profile in relation to dietary forage
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