Supplemental guanidino acetic acid improved feed conversion, weight gain, and breast meat yield in male and female broilers.

After the ban of meat and bone meal in 2001, European poultry producers observed a certain drop in performance. This may be due to the lack of creatine supply because vegetable feed ingredients do not contain this semi-essential nutrient. Guanidino acetic acid (GAA), which is a natural precursor of creatine, was supplemented (0.04, 0.06, 0.08, and 0.12 % of diet in form of CreAminoTM) to a vegetable diet (negative control). A positive control with 6 % meat and bone meal in feed was also included. 1056 male and 1056 female broilers were each equally distributed to 48 floor pens (eight / treatment) and fed starter and grower diets. At day 42, three birds per pen were sacrificed for carcass evaluation. Weight gain of female broilers fed the negative control diets was lower than that of birds fed the positive control diet (p<0.05) – for other performance criteria this effect was only numerical. Supplemental GAA in vegetable diets more than resolved this effect. Analysis of variance revealed that the optimal GAA supplementation level was somewhere between 0.06 % (p<0.05, breast yield – males) and 0.12 % (p<0.05, feed conversion – males and breast yield – females). In a few cases regression analysis was possible suggesting optimum GAA supplementation levels of 0.05 % (weight gain) and 0.11 % (feed conversion).