“New realities in pet nutrition”

The annual three day Alltech Feed Industry Symposium took place in Lexington, Kentucky from 23-26 April. The 1 550 delegates from 71 different countries were challenged by “new realities” in pet nutrition and were presented with the emerging new sciences of glycomics, which deals with the metabolic activity of complex sugar molecules and nutrigenomics, which relates nutrition to gene expression. Dr. Kelly Swanson, University of Illinois, USA, highlighted the cognitive effect of aging and the great promise of genomic biology. Dr. Fernando Rutz of the Universidade Federal de Pelotas, Brazil, explained how obesity is an issue for dogs, since it can lead to typical human diseases such as diabetes. Dr. Cheryl Dikeman of the Henry Doorly Zoo, USA, discussed the nutritional link between zoo animals and companion and farm animals. Other speakers included Dr. Ronan Power and Dr. Kate Jacques from Alltech and Dr. Dan Carey from The Iams Company. Video highlights from the symposium are available at www.alltech.com.