METABOLISM AND NUTRITION Effects of Dietary Fatty Acid Pattern on Melting Point and Composition of Adipose Tissues and Intramuscular Fat of Broiler Carcasses

Soybean oil (SO), rapeseed oil (RO), or two commercial fat products (FPl, FP2) were incorporated at 3.5% levels into four different corn-soybean meal mash broiler diets. Each of the four diets was fed to five replicates (pens) of broiler chickens for 42 d. After slaughtering the birds, samples of the abdominal fat, subcutaneous fat, and fat extracted from the thigh and the breast portion were collected from 16 birds per treatment. The fat samples were analyzed for their fatty acid composition using gas chromatography and the melting point of the abdominal fat was recorded. The results showed that the abdominal and subcutaneous fat had very similar fatty acid patterns and differed significantly from the composition of the fat extracted from breast and thigh. The different dietary