The Effect of Cellulose With and Without Supplemental Energy in Chick Diets ,

THE increased interest in the energy nutrition of the chicken and progressive increase in the energy concentration of diets used for poultry has led to the present accepted practice of formulating poultry diets to contain a minimum level of crude fiber. There are, however, some experimental data which indicate that fiber may be of benefit in poultry diets. Penquite (1936), Sheehy (1939), Heuser et al. (1945), Fraps (1946), Carrick and Roberts (1947a, b), Scott et al. (1947) and Robertson et al. (1948) among others, have reported that both growth and feed utilization are impaired when diets containing fibrous ingredients are fed to chicks. This effect has been reported by Panda and Combs (1950), Hill and Dansky (1954), Peterson et al. (1954), Mraz et al. (1956) and Richardson et al. (1956) to be the results of the reduction in energy brought about by the energy diluting property of fibrous ingredients. While…