The Role of Dietary Fat to Produce Chicken Meat as a Functional Food: A Review

Production of chicken meat is an important branch of food industry. Generally, poultry meat farmers aim to produce birds with superior body weight and feed conversion ratio. However, in line with current developments, there are other parameters that must to be taken into account such as lower body fat deposition and improvement in the nutrient composition of products corresponding to consumer requirements. Nowadays, extra focus has been given to designing and enrichment foods as functional foods, with components that have beneficial effects on human wellbeing. In definition, functional foods contain particular nutrients and / or non-nutrients that have an effect on human health, beyond what is usually known as nutritional effects. There are several compounds in foods that improve consumer’s health status. Among them the polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs, n-6 and n-3 series) and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) are the most functional and bioactives components of lipids. Chicken meat has been a common objective of nutritional modification because the absorbed dietary fatty acids from the small intestine directly enter into the chicken tissue lipids. This paper tries to review the recent findings in the area of chicken meat enrichment using dietary fats.