Growth Stimulating Effect of Soybean Oil and Unextracted Soybean Flakes in Chick Rations

A marked growth stimulating effect of certain fats in purified chick diets has been reported by Rand et al. (1958), and Dam et al. (1959). The latter workers have also shown that soybean oil, effective in purified diets, produces a significant improvement of growth rate when added to a ration composed of practical feedstuffs and typical of those used in commercial broiler production. Further studies in this laboratory have been conducted to investigate the use of heat-treated ground soybeans as a source of soybean oil for improving growth on practical rations, but without success (Norris et al., 1958). A possible explanation of these findings has been found in other work (Renner and Hill, 1959) in which the metabolizable energy of heated ground soybeans was substantially less than that expected from prior knowledge of the values of soybean oil meal and soybean oil, due to poor digestibility of the oil in …