Our article

“Re-esterified oils from palm acid oil do not alter pork fatty acid composition” 

by Tres A, Muzofa FM, Vilarrasa E, Guardiola F and Codony R

has been published by the European Journal of Lipid Science and Technology, 2015, 117: 1406-1416. DOI: 10.1002/ejlt.201400544

This research article is a part of our project on the “Valorization of fat by-products as animal feed ingredients” that we are carrying out within our research line “Fats in animal feeding”.

Acid oils are by-products of the food industry. They could be re-utilized as feed ingredients but their free fatty acid content is usually high. High free fatty acid contents in diets have been related to low digestibility values when used in feed. New fat products have been developed by their chemical esterification with glycerol (a by-product from biodiesel industry). Here, we have verified that these re-esterified products would not alter pork fatty acid composition with respect to the use of native
palm oil. Since results on productive parameters showed that they might increase feed efficiency and digestibility, overall the results support the re-utilization of these fat by-products in feed, alternative to the use of native palm oil or palm acid oil, provided that the benefits of the increase in feed efficiency counteract the cost of the esterification process.

The article can be downloaded HERE.

This project has been a collaboration of our research group and the Animal Science Department of the UAB, and the company SILO S.p.a (Florence, Italy). This work was financially supported by the Ministerio de
Economıa y Competitividad of the Spanish Government (Project AGL2010-22008-C02 and CTQ2012-32436), a pre-doctoral research grant from the Generalitat de Catalunya (Ref. 2012FI_B 00406), and post-doctoral research contracts from the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Marie Curie COFUND EU through the Beatriu de Pinos Post-doctoral Program (Ref. 2011BP_B 00113) and from the Juan de la Cierva program of the Ministerio de Economıa y Competitividad of the Spanish Government (ref JCI-2012-13412). We are also grateful to Enric Esteve-Garcia and the IRTA-Mas de Bover (Constantı, Spain) for the experimental farm facilities.