Rapid Growth of Chickens Fed an Improved Semi-Synthetic Diet

Chicks diets consisting only of synthetic and/or highly purified ingredients are useful in evaluation of specific dietary ingredients. Purified diets used in the past rarely supported good growth. A diet which supports extremely rapid growth would facilitate the development of assays for various essential nutrients. Larger differences in growth should be expected between negative and positive control groups, and increased requirements for specific factors might also be found under these conditions. Furthermore such a diet would be useful in measuring genetic and environmental variation in different experiments or laboratories. We have found that the diet we have developed is highly uniform and does serve as a sensitive measure of extranutritional variation, besides providing optimal growth. A known semi-synthetic diet (Ritchey et al., 1956) was modified mainly by increasing the dietary fat level and by the use of a different mineral mixture (Briggs et al., 1952). The composition of this diet . . .