As an undergraduate student, McElroy and her graduate advisor got the idea of feeding hot pepper oil to chickens while they and a graduate student from Mexico were eating hamburgers filled with hot sauce and covered with layers of jalapeno peppers. When they wondered aloud why people like spicy foods even though they often cause a runny nose, watery eyes, and other ill effects, the Mexican student said that people in his country believe that hot foods and spices provide protection from disease.
Their laboratory quickly made the jump from humans to poultry, and hypothesized that a diet that included some form of hot peppers might protect broilers and other commercial poultry from intestinal disease.
The research began with purchasing 1,530 commercial meat chicks, dividing them into three groups, and feeding each group a standard corn and soybean meal-based diet for 42 days. McElroy fed the plain feed to the first group, but added five parts per million of pure capsaicin to the feed of the second group, and 20 parts per million to the third groups feed.
She then administered Salmonella enteritidis to the chicks at 21, 28, and 42 days of age. She found that both the low and the high level of capsaicin increased resistance to the Salmonella without adversely affecting feed consumption, weight gain, or the taste of the chicken when cooked.
"What we saw from our initial microscopic evaluation is that the capsaicin appears to cause a very mild inflammation in the intestines," McElroy says.
One theory shes investigating is the possibility that the presence of the capsaicin-induced inflammation might make it more difficult for the Salmonella to bind to the intestinal cell
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Contact: Audrey McElroy
amcelroy@vt.edu
540-231-8750
Virginia Tech
17-Aug-2001