Silke Salavati
Senior lecturer at the Hospital for Small Animals of the Royal (Dick) School for Veterinary Studies (R(D)SVS) in Edinburgh.
Silke Salavati (née Schmitz) graduated from the Justus-Liebig University (JLU) in Giessen, Germany, in 2003. She spent her rotating internship and a Residency in Small Animal Internal Medicine at the Small Animal Hospital of the same university.
During that time, she also wrote her doctoral thesis on canine gastric emptying. Following on from this, she completed a PhD at the Royal Veterinary College, London, where she investigated the effect of probiotics on gut immunity in dogs with and without chronic inflammatory enteropathy (CIE). She returned to the JLU as a junior lecturer in 2013 and is currently a senior lecturer at the Hospital for Small Animals of the Royal (Dick) School for Veterinary Studies (R(D)SVS) in Edinburgh.
Recommendations for dietary changes or modifications are a routine part of treating gut diseases of dogs in every day practice. But what are indications for dietary fibre (DF) supplementation? Does the type of fibre matter? Is there any evidence for their use and how do they work? This article will explain some of the background and try to answer those questions.
Background – what are we talking about?
There has been a variety of definitions of the term DF over the past decades, until a rather bulky consensus was found (see box 1). In addition, especially naturally occurring fibres have been classified by their origin (from grains, vegetables, fruits), according to their chemical composition (non-starch polysaccharides, resistant oligosaccharides, starch) or by their physicochemical properties.
The latter is used frequently to divide fibres into (water-) soluble and hence fermentable, such as pectin and fructooligosaccharides (FOS), and insoluble less fermentable fibres, for example cellulose or lignin. DF can be further described on the basis of their molecular size as oligomers or polymers (see figure 1) (Verspreet et al., 2016).
The term prebiotic is also used to describe “nondigestible food ingredients that beneficially affect the host”, more specifically substances that “stimulate the growth and/or activity of one or a limited number of bacteria in the colon, and thus improves host health” (Gibson& Roberfroid, 1995), hence there is a degree of overlap between DF and prebiotics. A number of studies have shown that selective fermentation of indigestible fibres induces a variety of microbiological and metabolic changes in intestinal microbiota, which might benefit the host (De Preter et al. 2011).
So far, several dietary carbohydrates, mainly oligosaccharides, have been discussed as (candidate) prebiotics (Verspreet et al. 2016), and there seems to be no clear-cut distinction between prebiotic and nonprebiotic DF, as in vitro fermentation trials and clinical tests indicate that fermentability is a continuous variable which cannot be the basis for a discrete classification of DF (Verspreet et al. 2016). In addition, the individual variation in gut microbiota composition also plays a role in the ability to ferment certain DF (Verspreet et al. 2016).
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