Chickens Fed Olive Oil Are More Resilient to Environmental Stressors, Study Finds

A new study has found that chick­ens raised for their meat fed an olive oil-enriched diet were health­ier and more resilient to envi­ron­men­tal stres­sors than chick­ens fed diets enriched with other edi­ble oils.

Researchers from the Desert Research Center in Egypt eval­u­ated how one-day-old broiler chicks fed diets enriched with dif­fer­ent edi­ble oils coped when exposed to envi­ron­men­tal heat stress. They con­cluded olive oil was the best option for boost­ing growth per­for­mance and meat qual­ity.

The chick­ens were divided into groups fed a diet con­tain­ing three per­cent soy oil, corn oil, olive oil, fish oil and a con­trol diet with no edi­ble oil added.

The researchers found that chick­ens fed an olive oil-enriched diet expe­ri­enced a remark­able increase in high-den­sity lipopro­tein (HDL) cho­les­terol, col­lo­qui­ally known as good cho­les­terol, and super­ox­ide dis­mu­tase. This enzyme serves as an impor­tant antiox­i­dant.

Broiler chicks fed an olive oil-enriched diet also demon­strated the largest decrease in mal­on­di­alde­hyde, a marker of oxida­tive stress, com­pared to chicks fed any other diet.

Furthermore, broiler chicks fed olive oil were deemed to have the high­est meat qual­ity by enhanc­ing color mea­sure­ment and TBA val­ues, a sys­tem used to mea­sure lipid oxi­da­tion in meat.

The new study is the lat­est research to estab­lish the effects of adding olive oil to chicken diets.

In a 2015 study, researchers at the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Italy found that hens who con­sume a diet with polyphe­nol-rich extra vir­gin olive oil lay eggs with a lower cho­les­terol con­tent and a more favor­able fatty acid pro­file. The results sug­gested that these eggs could be health­ier for human con­sump­tion.

Previously, a study from a group of Chinese researchers found that adding olive oil to the diet of broiler chicks resulted in lower lev­els of sat­u­rated fatty acid in their breast and drum­stick meat. As a result, the meat of these chick­ens poses a lower risk of coro­nary heart dis­ease.

In addi­tion to sci­en­tific research, anec­do­tal accounts on the inter­net sug­gest that pigeons, genet­i­cally closely related to chick­ens, also ben­e­fit from olive oil added to their diets.

Moreover, olive oil has long been advo­cated for com­mon ail­ments in pet birds, such as par­rots, para­keets, pigeons and chick­ens. Furthermore, it is used to pro­mote their gen­eral health.

If an avian vet is unavail­able, var­i­ous meth­ods for using olive oil to treat crop impaction are avail­able online. This is a poten­tially fatal con­di­tion where a bird’s crop gets blocked, and food can­not move through its diges­tive sys­tem.

A pop­u­lar way to use olive oil to alle­vi­ate this painful con­di­tion is by warm­ing the oil and admin­is­ter­ing it a few times per day in minute amounts, with a syringe into a bird’s throat and a gen­tle throat mas­sage. Another option is to feed a bird bread driz­zled with olive oil.

For egg bind­ing, when a female bird can­not pass an egg and may result in death, a few drops of olive oil on her beak and vent – where the egg exits – is shared online as a rem­edy.