Supplementation

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In medicine, supplementation or supplementation (from the Latin supplere : "supplement, replace") refers to the targeted and supplementary intake of nutrients instead of or to supplement normal food. This can prevent malnutrition or support the treatment of deficiency diseases . Traditionally, in times of exceptional physical strain, supplements are taken as so-called nutritional supplements, e.g. B. during pregnancy and breastfeeding or in competitive sports. On the other hand, enriching meals with normal foods or isolated nutrients or nutrient mixtures (butter, maltodextrin, oil, protein powder, cream) is not a supplement.

Oral Food Supplementation (ONS)

Oral food supplementation is a form of artificial nutrition . This includes the commercially available drinking food as an oral balanced diet (OBD). They replace or supplement the normal diet, if the diet is not or only insufficiently possible due to illness or to maintain or improve the nutritional status. They can also have a positive effect on some diseases. In contrast to tube feeding, OBD can be partially balanced. The consistency is mostly liquid; But there are also porridge and jelly-like products (yoghurt, pudding), powdery and solid products (biscuits, bars). The flavor is often sweet, but spicy variants are now also available, for example soups.

Food supplements

According to European guidelines, food supplements are foods and therefore not supplements in the medical sense. They may only contain minerals and vitamins as nutrients. For a long time, there has been an increasing consumption of, also among the normally supplied population. After this market in North America had already been massively built up by the food and pharmaceutical industries during the 1980s, comparable trends can also be observed in Europe since the 1990s. While marketing measures try to suggest an undersupply to the consumer, nutritionists mostly point out that in Central Europe an adequate supply of vitamins and trace elements is guaranteed by a balanced diet .

Animal nutrition

In animal nutrition, the supplementation of compound feed is of considerable economic importance. Mixed chicken feed is mixed with small amounts of the sulfur-containing amino acid DL - methionine , which is essential for this species and which is contained in normal feed in too small amounts. The essential amino acids L - lysine and L - threonine are also used on a large scale for this purpose . Even vitamins are used for supplementation of animal feed systematically.

According to a study from 1984, common feeds have the following contents of the sulfur-containing amino acids methionine and cysteine :

Feed Total protein content [%] Methionine Cystine
(after oxidative pretreatment)
Corn 8.8 0.224 0.213
Winter wheat 12.2 0.214 0.292
Soybean 47.9 0.716 0.769
Meat-bone meal 49.5 0.656 0.808
Poultry meal 64.1 0.813 1,700
Feather meal 82.1 0.659 4,524

Individual evidence

  1. L. Valentini et al .: Guideline of the German Society for Nutritional Medicine (DGEM) - DGEM terminology in clinical nutrition. 2013; P. 105 ; accessed on January 9, 2019
  2. L. Valentini et al .: Guideline of the German Society for Nutritional Medicine (DGEM) - DGEM terminology in clinical nutrition. 2013; Pp. 10-106 ; accessed on January 9, 2019
  3. Directive 2002/46 / EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of June 10, 2002; Art. 1 and 2. Accessed January 12, 2019
  4. Manfred Spindler, Rainer Stadler, Herbert Tanner: Amino acid analysis of feedstuffs: Determination of methionine and cystine after oxidation with performic acid and hydrolysis . In: Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry . tape 32 , no. 6 , November 1984, pp. 1366 , doi : 10.1021 / jf00126a038 (English).
  5. Banned during the BSE crisis

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