Adiponectin (Ad) is an insulin-sensitizing adipokine known to stimulate fatty acid (FA) oxidation in skeletal muscle. Skeletal muscle can become resistant to Ad very rapidly, after only 3 days of high saturated fat feeding in rats. Whether the same occurs following a high polyunsaturated fat diet is unknown. Obesity, insulin resistance, and hyperlipidemia are recognized as low-grade inflammator...

ascorbic acid (vitamin c) supplementation has been documented as a useful tool to improve the performance of laying birds reared under harsh environmental conditions. however, there is limited information on the use of ascorbic acid as a means of ameliorating the stressful conditions imposed by feed restriction. to this effect a 3 × 2 factorial experiment was carried out to evaluate the effect ...

Regulation of the daily rhythm of milk synthesis is important to production animals and breastfeeding, but is difficult to observe in nursing animals. The rate of food intake varies over the day and is expected to create a daily rhythm of nutrient absorption. The objective of this study was to determine if the timing of food intake entrains a daily pattern of milk synthesis. Seventeen Holstein ...

The objective of this experiment was to study the effects of feeding group-housed gestating sows a diet with a high level of fermentable nonstarch polysaccharides (NSP; approximately 45% sugar beet pulp as fed) ad libitum on the development in individual feed intake characteristics and reproductive performance during three successive reproduction cycles. Performance of the ad libitum-fed sows w...

Compensatory growth (CG), an accelerated growth phenomenon which occurs following a period of dietary restriction is exploited worldwide in animal production systems as a method to lower feed costs. However the molecular mechanisms regulated CG expression remain to be elucidated fully. This study aimed to uncover the underlying biology regulating CG in cattle, through an examination of skeletal...

Energy requirements of animals are most readily expressed in terms of net energy (NE), while the energy yield of feed is, at least initially, expressed in terms of metabolisable energy (ME). Energy evaluation systems 'translate' NE requirements into ME requirements (ME systems) or assign NE values to feeds (NE systems). Efficiency of ME utilisation is higher for maintenance than for production ...

The goals of these experiments were to determine whether lactational anestrus would be prolonged by a 48-h fast at days 13 and 14 postpartum (pp) and, if so, to determine whether this effect could be reversed by treatment with the Ob protein leptin. We found that food deprivation on days 13 and 14 pp prolonged lactational infertility by 7 days and that the nutritional experience of both the dam...

OBJECTIVE Gender and diet have an important effect in cardiovascular disease and other aging-associated disorders, whose initiation and/or worsening seem to be delayed in females from different species and in animals subjected to caloric restriction (CR). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether cardiac muscle bioenergetic mitochondrial features could be responsible for these ben...

In two experiments, the effects of caloric restriction during the postinitiation phase of pancreatic carcinogenesis were evaluated. Male Lewis rats were given injections of azaserine at 14 days of age and weaned to the postinitiation test protocols at 21 days of age. In the first experiment, the caloric content of the diets was restricted by 10, 15, 20, and 30% of the intakes of the ad libitum-...

This study aimed to dissociate the peripheral effects of adrenalectomy (ADX) on triglyceride (TG) metabolism from those it exerts centrally on energy intake and to determine the impact of diet composition therein. Rats were fed either rodent chow or a diet high in sucrose and fat (HSF) and were adrenalectomized or left intact and pair fed to the ADX animals. Liver TG content, an index of hepati...