Slide 1
Good morning. I am Hans H. Stein, an associate professor in the 
Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois. And I'm 
here this morning to talk to you about some work we have done recently 
in which we measured the energy concentration and phosphorus 
digestibility in milk products fed to weanling pigs. This experiment was 
conducted by myself and my two co-workers, Dr. Beob Kim and Jung Wook 
Lee, who is a graduate student here in the Department of Animal 
Sciences.

Slide 2
The work I will talk about here will consist of a short introduction; 
I'll then talk about an experiment we conducted to measure energy 
concentrations in the milk products, then I will talk shortly about a 
project in which we measured the phosphorus digestibility in the same 
three milk products, and then finally a few conclusions.

Slide 3
As a little bit of background, when milk is processed, we get different 
products coming out of that processing procedure. First, if raw milk is 
made into cheese, the casein in the milk and most of the fat is removed 
and going into the cheese. So what we are left with is the whey, which 
consists of the lactose, a little bit of protein, and also the ash that 
is in the milk. From that whey, the whey proteins can be removed to 
produce whey protein concentrate, and that will leave us, then, with the 
whey without the whey proteins, and that product is called whey permeat. 
The whey permeat consists mainly of lactose and ash; and if the ash is 
removed from the permeat, then we will get a lactose product, or product 
that contains mainly lactose.

Slide 4
If we look at the composition of three of these different products, then 
we can look at whey powder as it's coming out of the cheese production 
and has been dehydrated, and that product usually has 95.8% dry matter. 
It contains 3647 calories/gram of gross energy, there's about 13% crude 
protein, 15 to 16% ash, and a little bit of calcium and phosphorus in 
this product. Now, as I said before, whey protein concentrate can be 
produced from whey powder by extracting the crude protein out of whey 
powder. And if that is done, we are left with a permeat, and in this 
case we used a permeat called Perlac 850. And Perlac 850 is a typical 
permeat containing approximately 97.7% dry matter, 3426 calories/gram of 
gross energy, and the protein is down to 4.3% because most of the 
protein was removed from the whey powder. There's 8.96% ash left in the 
product, so some of the ash was also removed. And calcium and phosphorus 
in this product is down to 0.42% and 0.57%. The last product we used was 
called Variolac 960, and Variolac 960 is produced by removing most of 
the ash from the Perlac 850 product. And now we have a product that 
contains 98.4% dry matter, 3657 calories/gram of gross energy, a little 
over 3% crude protein, and only 1.7% ash. And then calcium and 
phosphorus here is down to 0.11% and 0.10% because most of the ash was 
removed. So, from this it appears that the majority of the dry matter in 
Variolac 960 is lactose. So lactose in Variolac 960 is about 95 to 96%, 
whereas lactose in Perlac 850 is only 85% and lactose in whey powder is 
about 72%.

Slide 5
The objectives of the work we conducted here were to measure the DE and 
the ME in the three whey products that I just showed. And we also wanted 
to measure the standardized total tract digestibility, which is also 
called the STTD, of phosphorus in each of the three whey products.

Slide 6
In the first experiment, we measured energy concentrations in the three 
products.

Slide 7
In this experiment, we used 32 weanling barrows. They had an initial 
body weight of 9.2 kg. And they were placed in metabolism cages as shown 
here in the picture. Each cage is equipped with a feeder so we can 
measure the amount of feed that each pig is provided every day. There is 
a slatted floor, and below that floor there is a screen so we can 
collect all the feces from the pigs. Below the screen, there is actually 
a funnel so we can collect the urine as well. And that allows us to 
calculate the digestible and the metabolizable energy that we have in 
these diets. We used four different diets, and we had eight pigs per 
diet.

Slide 8
The diets we used consisted of a basal diet, and we had a whey powder 
diet, Perlac 850 diet, and a Variolac 960 diet. The basal diet consisted 
of 60% ground corn, 28% soybean meal, 8% fish meal, and 4% vitamins, 
minerals, a little bit of fat, and other products. We then took 70% of 
the basal diet and 30% of each of the three whey products to formulate 
our three test diets. So the whey powder diet consists of 70% basal diet 
and 30% whey powder, the Perlac 850 diet consists of 70% basal diet and 
30% Perlac 850, and Variolac 960 diet consists of 70% basal diet and 30% 
Variolac 960.

Slide 9
The results from this experiment...

Slide 10
Results are shown in this chart. We have the digestible energy and the 
metabolizable energy, and these data are on an as-fed basis. The blue 
bars are for the digestible energy, and the orange bars are for the 
metabolizable energy. Digestible energy is calculated by subtracting the 
energy in the feces from the energy intake of the pig, and the 
metabolizable energy is calculated by subtracting the energy in the 
feces and in the urine from the energy intake of the pig. We have the 
amount of energy on the left-hand side here, and each of the three whey 
products along the X-axis. For the whey powder product, we can see that 
the digestible energy was 3494 calories/gram, whereas the metabolizable 
energy was 3313 calories/gram. The Perlac 850 product contained a little 
bit less energy, and there was 3177 calories/gram of digestible energy 
and 3009 calories/gram of metabolizable energy. And both of these values 
were significantly lower than for the whey powder. However, when we went 
to Variolac 960, we see that the energy increased compared with the 
Perlac 850, so we had 3626 calories/gram of digestible energy in 
Variolac 960, and 3537 calories/gram of metabolizable energy.

Slide 11
If we look at the data on a dry matter basis, we'll see that the whey 
powder contains 3646 calories/gram of digestible energy, and 3462 
calories/gram of metabolizable energy. Perlac 850 contained 3253 
calories/gram of digestible energy and 3081 calories/gram of 
metabolizable energy. And Variolac 960 contained 3683/gram of digestible 
energy and 3593 calories/gram of metabolizable energy. And we can see 
here again that the values for whey powder and Variolac were 
significantly greater than the values for Perlac. And the reason we see 
an increase in energy when we go to Variolac compared with Perlac is 
that the ash was removed from the product.

Slide 12
In the second experiment, we measured the digestibility of phosphorus in 
the same three whey products.

Slide 13
In this experiment, we used 32 barrows. In this experiment, the pigs 
weighed 11 kg at the beginning of the experiment. And again, the pigs 
were placed in metabolism cages exactly like before, but this time we 
collected only the fecal materials from the pigs and not the urine. 
Again, we measured the feed intake of each pig and we collected the 
fecal materials over a five-day period. We had four diets and eight pigs 
per diet in this experiment.

Slide 14 The diets we used were the diet based on whey powder, a diet 
based on Perlac 850, and a diet based on Variolac 960, and we also had a 
phosphorus-free diet in this experiment. The diet based on whey powder 
contained 44.5% cornstarch, 30% whey powder, and then there was sugar, 
and soybean oil, and a few other ingredients included. All vitamins and 
minerals were included in these diets to the recommended levels except 
that there was no phosphorus added to the diet. So all the phosphorus in 
this diet came from the whey powder. Perlac 850 diet was formulated 
using the same principles again with 44.5% cornstarch, 30% Perlac 850, 
and sugar and soybean oil and a few other ingredients. And for the 
Variolac 960 diet, we used exactly the same composition and the only 
difference was that here the 30% whey product was Variolac 960 instead 
of Perlac 850. Again, in all of these three diets, the only phosphorus 
in each diet was provided by the whey product itself. We used a 
phosphorus-free diet that consisted of 29.2% cornstarch, 20% lactose, 
20% sugar, soybean oil, and 26.8% other ingredients, and 20% of these 
other ingredients was actually gelatin, which is a phosphorus-free 
source of amino acids. We also had quite a few synthetic amino acids in 
this diet to make it as balanced as possible. The resason for using the 
phosphorus-free diet is that by feeding the phosphorus-free diet, we 
could measure what the excretion of phosphorus from the pigs were if 
they were fed no phosphorus, and we could use those values to correct 
the data from the other three diets.

Slide 15
Results from this experiment...

Slide 16
The results are shown in this chart, where we have the digestibility of 
phosphorus in each of the three products. The blue bars represent the 
apparent total tract digestibility of phosphorus and the orange bars 
represent the standardized total tract digestibility of phosphorus. You 
see for the whey powder, the apparent total tract digestibility was 84.3 
and the standardized total tract digestibility was 91.2%. For Perlac 
850, the apparent total tract digestibility was 86.1% and the 
standardized total tract digestibility of phosphorus was 93.1%. And in 
the Variolac 960 product, we had 55.9% apparent total tract 
digestibility of phosphorus and 91.8% standardized total tract 
digestibility of phosphorus. So what we see here is that when we look at 
the apparent total tract digestibility, we had about the same values for 
whey powder and Perlac 850, but a much lower value for Variolac 960. 
However, when we look at the standardized total tract digestibility, 
there were no differences among these three products. The reason we get 
a different result when we look at the standardized total tract 
digestibility compared with the apparent total tract digestibility is 
that all values for the standardized total tract digestibility are 
corrected for the losses of phosphorus from pigs that were fed the 
phosphorus-free diet. And by correcting for these losses, we get a 
little bit greater value in all products for the digestibility, but this 
correction means a lot more for Variolac 960 than for the other 
products. And the reason for this is that the concentration of 
phosphorus in Variolac 960 is lower than in the other products and 
therefore, the correction for endogenous losses increases the 
digestibility proportionally much more than for the other products. This 
also illustrates why it is more correct to formulate diets based on the 
standardized total tract digestibility of phosphorus compared with the 
apparent total tract digestibility of phosphorus, because the values for 
apparent total tract digestibility of phosphorus are influenced by the 
endogenous losses, which is not the case for the values for the 
standardized total tract digestibility of phosphorus. But again, overall 
for all three products, we saw a very high digestibility of phosphorus 
above 90% on a standardized total tract digestibility basis, and this is 
much greater than what we will find when we look at vegetable feed 
ingredients. So all three products are excellent sources of digestible 
phosphorus.

Slide 17
A few conclusions that we can draw from these two experiments ...

Slide 18
We have seen that the metabolizable energy on an as-fed basis was 3317 
calories/gram for whey powder. That was greater than in Perlac 850, 
which was only 3009, but the whey powder had a similar ME value compared 
with the Variolac 960 product at 3537 calories/gram. All three products 
can be used in diets fed to pigs, but if Perlac 850 is used, we have a 
little bit less energy compared with using whey powder or Variolac 960. 
For phosphorus, we saw that the digestibility on the basis of 
standardized total tract digestibility was 91.2, 93.1, and 91.8% in the 
three products. If we convert that to percent of standardized total 
tract digestible phosphorus in the products, we can do that by 
multiplying the digestibility values for phosphorus by the total 
concentration of phosphorus in the products. And when we do that, we see 
that we have 0.57% standardized total tract digestible phosphorus in 
whey powder, we have 0.53% in Perlac 850, but we have only 0.09% in 
Variolac 960. So with these data, we can formulate diets for weanling 
pigs using either whey powder, Perlac 850, or Variolac 960. Each of 
these products are supposed to be valuable products in weanling pigs' 
diets, and now we have data for both the metabolizable energy 
concentration and the standardized total tract digestibility of 
phosphorus in these diets.

Slide 19
I'd like to thank you for your attention. I hope you find this 
information interesting, and I would like to draw your attention to our 
website, where you can find a lot more information about nutrient 
digestibility in different feed ingredients and many other issues 
related to swine nutrition.