Over recent months, there have been many warning flags in the scientific press regarding the failure and potential danger of the use of probiotics in poultry production. Critics have indicated that there is very little safety and efficacy data on probiotic use, that they can lead to harmful bacterial overgrowth in the digestive tract, or that they might not have any efficacy at all.
Of course, there is no doubt that probiotics can add value to poultry production, however this news reminds us that you get that value only if you choose the right ones. We are on the verge of important and game-changing advances in probiotics, but the truth of the matter is that all probiotics aren’t created equal and that, to achieve a new era of optimized efficacy, specific strains need to be chosen, they need to be chosen for specific reasons, and they need to be applied at specific times.
Need for sharper focus
Probiotic strains should be chosen for their optimized beneficial outcomes in poultry first, but frequently this isn’t the case. Probiotic strains on the market are often chosen for their low cost and ease of manufacturing or speed of registration.
The narrow set of probiotic bacterial strains that we have at our disposal are easy to manufacture; are derived from other industrial processes, such as cheese or winemaking, rather than chosen for their ability to reside in and impact the gastrointestinal tract of a chicken; and are easy to register as they are pre-existing on GRAS or other “safe lists” of bacterial strains.
Unfortunately, these narrow criteria for selection result in “more of the same” in regard to species, efficacy and results in the field.
There are many new research-proven strains of bacteria available that push innovation in probiotics forward but that may be difficult to manufacture or register. End users need to be demanding probiotic producers to continue to develop these innovations, and probiotics producers need to commit to solving problems to bring these new products to market.
When assessing probiotics for outcome, we need to move outside the feeding trial “rut” that we seem to be stuck in. Every probiotic will come with a set of feeding trials to support the same general feed conversion ratio and gut health statements, but as a nutritionist it is easy to be cynical about such data.
We have a variety of new scientific tools and methods at our disposal to explore the microbiome of poultry and these need to be used more frequently to assess probiotic efficacy and how these products are driving beneficial outcomes. Microbiome investigations have demonstrated that probiotics can shift bacterial populations in beneficial ways, can alter the metabolism of the microbiome and of the host animal, and can steer immunity for the good or for the bad. We need to use these new tools to first understand what the outcome of the probiotic is, and then diagnose and predict that we have a high level of certainty that it will work.
Finally, and most importantly, the outcome for a probiotic will always be driven by the context in which you put it. Any probiotic may work very well in one complex and not at all in another simply because the context is different. As we dive deeper into the poultry microbiome, we are understanding that there are many more variables to consider than just diet, environment and weather. If those doing research on their probiotic products aren’t considering those variables in their own research, and in their recommendations for use, then the odds of actually achieving the promised efficacy may be no better than a coin toss.
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