There exists a multitude of factors influencing the health of pigs which include, but not limited to, management practices, environment, feed quality, and pathogen load. Young piglets are sensitive to many external stimuli due to their immature biological functions and the modern day weaning age exacerbates problems associated with this transitional period. Consequently, enteric diseases in the nursery are common and are often expressed as low intake of feed, depressed growth, and diarrhea.

Anti-nutritional factors in soy protein pose a risk to young animal health. But it is possible to minimize the factors that are most critical to the growth and development of piglets - the result being a high-quality soy protein and improved animal health.

Soybean meal (SBM) is commonly accepted as the source of plant-based protein that contains all the essential amino acids necessary to maximize animal growth and development. Yet, when ordinary SBM is used in starter feed, young animals have a hard time digesting their diet. Soy’s natural content of anti-nutritional factors (ANFs) is the reason.

Gut health can be an extremely broad topic with different meanings to different individuals. There is not a clear definition of what factors are included in “gut health”, but it is some combination of different physiological and functional features that affect the development, growth and maintenance, and immune status of an animal (Kogut and Arsenault, 2016). Furthermore, most would agree that the microbial community found within the gastrointestinal tract of poultry plays an important role in the “gut health” of the host through benefiting nutrient digestion and absorption, development of gut barrier function, and preventing colonization of pathogenic bacteria. Animals lacking a diverse gut microbial community tend to have a lesser developed immune system and are more susceptible to disease challenges (Bailey, 2019).

In the last two years, Hamlet Protein has developed scientific studies aimed at determining the maximum levels of soybean meal (SBM) antinutritional factors (ANFs) that should be in broiler starter diets, leading to interesting findings, published in "The Poultry Site" in various articles. The most relevant SBM ANFs in poultry farming are trypsin inhibitor activity (TIA), the indigestible oligosaccharides stachyose and raffinose and the antigen beta-conglycinin.