Here is the first episode of the New Revelations in Transition Cow Nutrition from the 2022 Cornell Nutrition Conference four-part mini-series. Essential versus required nutrition requirements is the subject matter from Dr. Mike Van Amburgh of Cornell University. Dr. Clay Zimmerman from Balchem adds his comments in this podcast as well.
Guests: Dr. Mike Van Amburgh, Cornell University
Here is the first episode of the New Revelations in Transition Cow Nutrition from the 2022 Cornell Nutrition Conference four-part mini-series. Essential versus required nutrition requirements is the subject matter from Dr. Mike Van Amburgh of Cornell University. Dr. Clay Zimmerman from Balchem adds his comments in this podcast as well.
Laying out a new way to think about essential and non-essential nutrients, Dr. Van Amburgh began the series by highlighting the value of understanding nutritional equivalencies such as amino acids and carbohydrates and reframing the function of energy. 2:28
While microbial proteins are made of both essential and non-essential amino acids, the key factor is remembering synthesis is energy intensive.
Mentioning the adaptability of the organ, Dr. Van Amburgh shares that not only do the nutrient sources allow a cow to manipulate blood flow, but it allows for the ability of groups to form to maximize efficiency. 8:51
Beginning with the general understanding of optimal supply, Dr. Van Amburgh shifted his discussion to anabolic output responses. He shared that when considering the extraction of branched chains, lysine tends to undergo obligate metabolism in the mammary gland. 11:09
Ultimately milk protein synthesis requires key metabolic pathways, but how does an optimal supply of amino acids affect anabolic output?
When analyzing shifts in nutrient profiles, Dr. Van Amburgh shared the transparency that occurs when building fatty acid diets. He mentioned he’s researching the value of pushing methionine up to 1.19 grams and then nearly 2.7 times for lysine. 17:25
So what does the future of nutrition modeling look like? Based on a meta-analysis, Dr. Zimmerman added the biggest goal in nutritional modeling continues to be focused on the differences between essential and required nutrients. 38:31
Wrapping up the conversation, Dr. Zimmerman shared key takeaways from Dr. Van Amburgh’s webinar and briefly mentioned the meta-analysis highlight of choline as a required nutrient in transitional dairy cows. 42:39
If you would like to review Dr. Van Amburgh’s webinar from the 2022 Cornell Mini Symposium, you can view all four webinars in the series at balchem/com/realscience.
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Scott Sorrell (00:07):
Good evening everyone, and welcome to the Real Science Exchange, the podcast we're leading scientists and industry professionals meet over a few drinks to discuss the latest ideas and trends in animal nutrition. Hi, I'm Scott Sorrell, one of your hosts here tonight at The Real Science Exchange. Today we're taking a different approach and bringing you a series of talks given at the 2022 Cornell nutrition Conference as part of the new revelations in transition, Cal Nutrition's many symposia. There are four in this series, so be sure to come back and listen to all of them. The first presentation is from Dr. Mike Van Amberg from Cornell, Mike will share new thinking around categorizing nutrients as essential or required, and how that might impact Cal performance. Before we dig in, I'd like to welcome back our trustee, rusty co-host Dr. Clay Zimmerman. Welcome Clay. Thank you for agreeing to join me here once again.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (01:03):
Yeah, thanks Scott. Good to be here tonight.
Scott Sorrell (01:07):
Yep. So, as customer here to exchange, I gotta ask what's in your glass tonight?
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (01:13):
And my thermos tonight is my favorite diet beverage, so. Okay.
Scott Sorrell (01:18):
Very well. And that's your favorite, what I'm having tonight? I've seen that before, yeah. Oh, good.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (01:22):
What's in, what's in your
Scott Sorrell (01:24):
Glass tonight? Well, in honor of Dr. Van Amberg, I am having a scotch. I don't drink the high price stuff that he drinks. I'm drinking Macallan. That's high enough price. But Mike, yeah, he's got higher taste than I do. So in the spirit of our virtual pub, let's raise our glasses clay for a quick toast before we proceed. Cheers, my friend.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (01:42):
Cheers.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
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Scott Sorrell (02:08):
Since this podcast will be a little different. Let's start with some content from Mike's talk. There's so much new research coming out, especially around the transition period and how the new NASM recommendations can change the way we balance rations. Dr. Mike Van Amberg lays out a new way to think about essential and non-essential nutrients.
Mike Van Amburgh (02:28):
Talk mostly about Andrew Lapeer and Andre Ortega. Currently a postdoc and a PhD student contributed to this. So I'll recognize them. So what are we gonna do this morning? We're gonna talk about essential versus required nutrients. I'm gonna talk about implications for both energy and protein requirements. I'm gonna have some examples of essential and required nutrients and metabolism where the interaction might limit productivity. And, and I'll summarize. I think it starts, it's a real simple thing. You know, when we, when we think about what we're formulating for most of the time we're thinking about required nutrients, right? And we can do that a couple different ways. I'm gonna focus on amino acids a lot today. We could go lots of different directions, but this is, this is easier for me to think about you know, what is an essential nutrients, a substance required by the body for survival, growth, and reproduction that allow for essential functions that cannot be made endogenously, but can be interverted to other forms of nutrients.
Mike Van Amburgh (03:26):
I'm gonna come back to that because that seems to be a real buzz right now, right? We talk about efficiency of use of immuno acids and that, you know, the new nassos out, we do that in the C N C P S, and I think we get confused about what that number means. And, and you know, do you want an optimum output? Do you want a maximum output or do you want the highest efficiency? Well, the highest efficiency is probably a deficient animal, right? We all learn that kind of in our sophomore nutrition class, but sometimes when we're out there, we're not, we get caught up in these efficiencies, all right? And I think we'll talk about that essential amino acids, you know, such as methionine, lycine, histamine. We can go through the rest of them. You know, carbohydrates are essential. We can't, body doesn't make those. I gotta figure out this. Pointer minerals, vitamins, things of that nature. Again, I'm gonna stick to amino acids this morning. What's a required nutrient? Well, a required nutrient can be made from other metabolites synthesized or inter converted, right? And an easy example of that is a non-essential amino acid. Is that free? Now there's a non-essential nutrients free.
Mike Van Amburgh (04:42):
No. They take energy, they take resources, they take reducing equivalence, they take atp, they take glucose, they take essential amino acid, inter conversions, right? And, and that's all built in when we're trying to formulate for these essential amino acids and their requirements. And we look at these efficiencies, part of that efficiency is the conversion to non-essential amino acids or any other use that that amino acid might have in, in my experience with the C N C P S. Some of that's really difficult to get to for a lot of different reasons. I'll talk about that. I think we have to start thinking that way. Some of this I think, can be framed out with the right experiments and we'll, we'll talk a little bit about that. This metabol protein thing, right? You know, 10 years ago when we started framing out the essential reframing the essential amino acid requirements as a function of energy in, in version seven, I had several people say to me, oh, you can throw metabol protein out.
Mike Van Amburgh (05:45):
Now, my grad students were advocating that. My postdocs were advocating that. And I'm, I'm, like I said, democracy doesn't always win here. The answer is no.
Mike Van Amburgh (06:43):
They're required in very high amounts. And I think as we get to higher and higher levels of productivity, all of a sudden those things start to show up and we don't, don't know how to deal with it. I'll give you a couple examples. So if we think about it, non-essential amino acids generally make up between 46 and 53% of the total amino acid intake depends on the protein
Mike Van Amburgh (07:36):
Thus, you know, thus the intake of non-essential room and escape will provide MP as non-essentials. Just like essentials, right? And you know, of course, microbial proteins also comprised of both essential and non-essential amino acids. So our problem, we've been a little myopic about this because we just, we, even though we analyze for, we get all the 20 amino acids out of a mass spec or an H P L C, whatever technique you're using, GC doesn't matter. They're there, we just don't do anything with them.
Mike Van Amburgh (08:29):
Right? How many of you see milk fats now at 4, 5, 4 4, 4 5. Yeah, exactly. That takes a hell of a lot of reducing equivalence. We sure don't want to be spending them on conversion of essentials to non-essentials, right? Maybe a little bit, but we gotta be careful, right? Where's the upper limit? So, so can possibly be limiting under conditions of high demand implies in this, I think this is a big one. It it implies a reduced efficiency of use of essential amino acids have converted to non-essentials as they're not directly used for protein metabolism, right? Because in what I mean protein net a lot they're, they're making a product, but sometimes they go different directions to do different things in cellular structures, you know, so we get into, we get into this concept of metabolic flexibility in the mamm gland and nitrogen use efficiency, right? And, and there's a lot on this slide.
Mike Van Amburgh (09:27):
We talk about how adaptable the organ is and there's lots of sources of, of nutrients, you know, and the cow can manipulate blood flow. I'm gonna come back to the blood flow thing a little bit with one example based on requirements or or recognition of varying nutrient supply. You know, the output up uptake output of amino acids in the gland is not uniform across the am amino acids. I wanna talk about that based on, you know, methyls one, two, and three groupings of amino acids, right? When we've got lots of different signaling pathways that will play into how the gland responds to nutrients.
Mike Van Amburgh (10:05):
So our general understanding is an optimal supply of amino acids with improved energy status will maximize anabolic output, right? But notice I use the word optimum, not maximum supply that cuz I think there are optimums per unit of energy, right? That's just the way we're thinking about it. But there's, there's tweaks around that. So if we look at, if we look at the, the memory adaptability and we think about where things are coming from, here's here's me's, me's categories, and this modified by Helene's LaPierre. So we've got group one, group two and group three, group one, you know, histidine and ity, methionine, tyrosine and tryptophan efficiency. So if we look at efficiency of use, amino acid, nitrogen uptake per amino acid, nitrogen in the milk for, for these guys, it's all one. If we look at isoleucine, leucine, valine, lycine, arginine, and thine, all of a sudden it's greater than 1.15, right?
Mike Van Amburgh (11:09):
So the uptake is pretty high. If we look at the group threes down here, which are mostly non-essential cystine, we gotta flip back and forth between meth proline, I'm gonna come back to proline. It's less than one. Okay? So when we think about extraction of branch chains across the lactation, there's a lot of cellular maintenance and anabolic responses related to the branch chains especially. So, you know, and lycine undergoes obligate metabolism in the mammary gland. So one of Helene LaPierre and I used to have these crazy conversations and she look at me and go, Mike, why does the memory gland take up all the lycine at seas? And I would just look back at her and say, because it must have a use for it. She goes, that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't come out in the milk. I said, it doesn't come out directly in the milk.
Mike Van Amburgh (11:55):
That doesn't mean the mammary gland doesn't have a use for it, right? And, and we confuse that, right? We think, well if it's an essential amino acid and it's a limiting amino acid, why is it taking it all up? Well, it must have other uses. What, how many of you know that lysine involved in fatty acid synthesis? Yeah. Those of you that have studied those things,
Mike Van Amburgh (12:40):
The cows are telling us it might be true, right? Arginine is taken up in drastic excess, right? Two and a half times, I'm gonna come back to that. Metabolism products include proline, orine and urea. Proline is high in milk casing, right? And we can look at, you know, we can look at input and output relationships here. And you can see, you know, if you come over to this one, you can see this group one, group two, group three, you can see input and output for the group one input output for the groups two input output for the group three, right? And you can see subtle, subtle shifts in there that say, Hey, you know what, this isn't uniform and they're going to, they're going inter convert a bunch of those amino acids, you know, and you can do this kind of thing here, right?
Mike Van Amburgh (13:26):
And talk about non-essentials. You can see there's, you know, isoleucine, leucine, lycine, fenal and tyranny and can go into the seal and, you know, off to CO2 can go lots of different directions. Three and E can come in, you've got ammonia coming off. Notice that coline's over here, I'm gonna come back to choline at the end of my talk. Triptan here can go in to tyl choline, pyruvate, here's some other amino acids going into oxalate. The less of these intermediates that we have, the greater the pressure for these things to run that way, which means we're going to use up more of our essential amino acids to fill those pathways, right? Because it's an obligate function. But if we had some other non-essentials in there and some other intermediates coming from other places, then that wouldn't have to happen, right? We get into the branch chain amino acids and we get into alpha keter glide, you know, the glutamine, glutamine, glutamate glutamine cycle.
Mike Van Amburgh (14:29):
And down here you can see the arginine, proline, you know, cycle. So, so there's all these interactions. I think this is important because it's not a free ride, right? If we start to throw in where we, you know, we can do the, the cystine, cysto choline, you know, get into those interactions, it doesn't really matter. You've got methionine in here, homocystine, hydroxyproline. In each one of these interactions you're using equivalent reducing equivalence. You're using attp, you know, branch chain to branch chain keto acids. We're using energy to do all of these transformations. So what ain't free? And as we get cows to higher and higher levels of productivity, all of a sudden we probably need to start considering those. And, and we, we hit one of those walls. We think in an experiment that I'll share with you, many of you saw last year, right?
Mike Van Amburgh (15:26):
If we just look at arginine you know, this is from a Morris at all, you know, we get different. You get diet arginine, you get protein turnover, you get endogenous synthesis, where's it go, right? Well, in the arginine uptake, again, 2.45 to one, the range is 0.88 to 4.18, right? So arginine, we can set an a semi essential amino acid because it can be produced in the cow. Yet, if you look at what it does, it has a lot of rolls, blood flow, proline, polyamide, cell stability, glutamate. I don't think that's really a semi essential amino acid, right? Just the fact that she can make a little bit of it doesn't mean that it might not be required at some point. Well, it is required, right? The question is, is does she ever run out of it? And how do we know trying to figure that out is, is the trick, right?
Mike Van Amburgh (16:25):
So we did this study this was what we did last, I showed this last year. I'm gonna come back to it because there's a story here, right? And I think it helps flesh this out, right? So we did this menin titration, you know, these cows, these cows were making, when we put 'em on study, sorry, you can't see everything there. They were 90 to 92 pounds of milk. Three nine protein, three nine fat, and three one through protein, right? This wasn't an amino acid study, but we used version seven thinking to build these diets. Okay? There's the composition. I'm not gonna spend time on that. But we're trying to be transparent about how we build these diets just so everybody knows what we're doing. Heavy, you know, fatty acid blends some sugar, getting the amino acids up there, you know, a little bit of ruen stimulation, 54% forage, dry ground corn a pretty good corn silage and average haage sugar, right?
Mike Van Amburgh (17:25):
We're pushing that up, methionine up at 1.19 grams per m caliban and then 2.7 times that for the lysine. So we're pushing quite a few grams and we're trying to blend up the fatty acids because we, there's some metabolism there that we think is important. Here's the important part of this, right? So when we start looking at these cows, these, so we're, we're now we're cows, 190 days in milk, roughly, they're consuming about 26, almost 27 kilograms of dry intake. They're making about 39 to 40 kilograms of milk. Not quite 40 there, or milk faster. Four six to four seven, right? Is that pretty good? Yeah. And we took 'em from three nine in mid lactation. So this is where I think lycine is really important for milk fat synthesis. But you gotta have the methyine there too, right? You can't ignore, you can't do one without the other. And lo and behold, these girls did what? They made a decent amount of protein, right? We had good fermentation. We must have had a lot of propagate. We had good glucose production. So we're at 3 35, almost three four, right? While we're up at close to 4, 6 47.
Mike Van Amburgh (18:39):
Keep going. Energy, okay? Energy corrected. Energy corrected milk running, you know, in the high forties, right? Lose cost performer pretty well. Yeah, those are pretty good cows. Dave Baro, you know, here, I'll come back to this story. Dave Baro is part of this. He's calling me up saying, Mike, did you buy jerseys at the research farm? Like, no, I was laughing at him. I said, what are, he goes, why are you laughing at me? I said, why are you asking me that question? He goes, because you got cows that are performing. I've never seen Holsteins perform that way. That can't be true, right? Well, you know, it's, they're really Holsteins Dave. And he said that just I, we don't have any Holstein data that looks like that, right? And what was really blowing him away were the de novos and the mixed, right? So we're having this conversation, right?
Mike Van Amburgh (19:39):
And then, you know, I didn't understand this until I went and pulled one of his, his papers and here's where his data stops and here's where our Holsteins are at, here's the jerseys, right? So these cows are performing like the best jerseys. Okay? So this is cool. So Dave thinks this is awesome, right? So Dave's like, Hey, this is really great, you know, we gotta figure out how to do this some more. Can you repeat this? You know? And then one day he walks over and he goes, I don't like your study. I put my Cheesemaker hat on and I don't like your study. And I'm looking at him like, it's our study. Excuse me. He was not today. It's your study right now because I'm a cheesemaker and I don't want to buy your milk. Well, what the hell's wrong with the milk? He says, if I have to make cheddar from that milk, I have to skim it.
Mike Van Amburgh (20:28):
Now why is that? He says, I can't make legal cheddar with that milk cuz you got too much fat and not enough protein. I said, what do you mean not enough protein? I said, what does it need to be? He goes, well, that level of fat, you gotta be at three six protein. And before I could say, I thought it was, he goes, I think you're short on non-essential acids. And I started laughing. He goes, why are you laughing at me? I said, because we just had the conversation yesterday in my lab group, we think we're short on non-essential acids. And almost simultaneous, we looked at each other and said, proline. And then we both started laughing, right? Why would we say proline? Why the hell would we say proline casing? Yeah, it's casing. If there's enough energy there, they could be short on proline, because you need to make the three-dimensional structure.
Mike Van Amburgh (21:24):
Guess what? You need to make the three-dimensional structure of casing. You need one hell of a lot of proline. Okay? So let's go there. So if you look at the amino acid composition of casing and bacterial protein, I threw the bacteria on here. Sorry, not, I didn't have time to do it on the same basis. I just
Mike Van Amburgh (22:25):
So if you run outta proline, what can't you do? You can't make casing. Now we don't know this as a fact, but it was interesting that the milk chemist and the nutritional physiologist did what We came to the same conclusion from two very different directions, right? So all of a sudden we're going, oh, okay, that's interesting. We probably need to focus on this, right? And if you look at, if you look at proline production and the mammary gland, you know, there, there is a pathway for this. But notice, you know alpha keta glut eight and n na DPH is coming from the kreb cycle. So you're re you're, you need reducing equivalence and you need arginine, right? So there's that arginine thing as a semi essential acid, but it's still implying it's what, it's semi essential, but it's required, right? And we, again, this is one of those things where we muddy the waters by just saying, wow, it's semi essential.
Mike Van Amburgh (23:29):
I don't know if we really have to worry about it cuz she's just gonna make it. I'm not sure if we have Holsteins making four eight fat and three three or three four protein, maybe she can't make enough, right? Cuz she's already used up all of her reducing equivalents to do what? Make the fat the fat was probably easier actually. You know, and this is another thing cuz you get into the energy requirements to make protein versus deposit the fat and they're two different things. So anyhow, so we've got that. We did a study. This is I, I didn't forget about this. I just didn't really have a, I've never had a chance to actually pull it out of the thesis. We did an apple masal infusion study years ago of histamine and proline and this is C N C Ps version 6.1.
Mike Van Amburgh (24:18):
So this, by today's standards, this thing's really broken. So just bear with me as I go through it cuz I would like to take these diets and rerun them to see where we are actually at
Mike Van Amburgh (25:23):
So I, what I'm thinking is I can't give, I could give the cows arginine or I could just give him proline to reduce the pressure on conversion, which should take that towards a positive side, right? I'm just playing off the pathway. And then the histidine is the histidine. You know, we know, I, you know, Andrew and I looked at these numbers today and then the histidine requirements way, way low. So that's okay, we fixed that. So I, well, we think we have, okay, so when you look at the, when you look at the cows, this was a really interesting outcome. There are about 26 kilos, 25, they drop a little bit on the proline. So here's the control. Histidine, histidine plus proline in the proline feed. Efficiency, fat corrected milk. 1 95, 1 92, 1 9 5 2 0.1. Okay? So we pop a little bit, but some of that's the intake milk, no significant difference.
Mike Van Amburgh (26:18):
Fat corrected milk, no significant difference. But we tended to go up, you know, we're at 52, 51, 8, 50, 49, 52, 4 fat, 18 71, 18 0 6, 17 36, 19 29, right? On a prolene infusion, those girls popped, you know, 50 depends on which way you wanna look at it. But you're looking at 50 to a hundred grams, not quite a hundred grams of fat. Lactose stayed pretty. Steady protein, no, no big effect, right? But we did see this big increase in milk fat. And again, with the way our study, the, with the power of it, we couldn't quite get significance there. There is a large increase in lactose. I'm not sure what that means. Difference in PNS or mpn, right? So we see some subtle effects here. The feed efficiency thing, the fat is the one that really intrigues me, right? Because 1871 to 1804, you know, these are different. If you do a mean separation, 1736, that's definitely significant.
Mike Van Amburgh (27:21):
And the same thing here. So if you do mean separation, these guys are all a little bit different. And the best performance is on the pro prolene infusion. And that's on the fat, not on the protein. That's the other thing I think we have to get our heads out of our heads is if amino acids are not directly related to milk protein, the related to protein synthesis, but that protein synthesis could be for fat, could be for lactose, could be for milk protein, right? So we have to, we have to separate those out. This was the interesting thing. We did blood flow in this study. Here's the control. There's the histamine, there's the histamine plus proline, there's the proline, right? So the cow
Mike Van Amburgh (28:10):
I don't know if that's what this is or the cows are just responding to the proline. But you see a nice increase in blood flow here, right? So in other words, the gland is seeing something and responding to it, right? Back to how they, they sense some of these nutrients, right? So again, proline could be important, don't have conclusive evidence. We think in our study that may, in that that study I just showed you, it's one of the things that may be inhibiting, right? If we look at some recent infusion studies, what's my time here? This one I'm 20 minutes. Oh, we're good. Haha.
Mike Van Amburgh (28:52):
Well that's unusual for me.
Mike Van Amburgh (29:55):
Increased from the control. Increased from the control, right? So both of them gave increases about the same range. You know, a little significance there. A little difference in lactose here. It went the other way. When you look at fat synthesis, eh, you don't see quite as much protein. Nice push in protein. Same thing there, right? How much of that is it? Oops. How much is, how much of that is essential versus non-essential Looks like a lot of it is essential, right? So in mid lactation cows, and I think this is one of those things, you're gonna see this in a minute, in a mid lactation cow, is she stressed for nutrients? No. So do you know, would I expect to see big changes here? Would I wish these guys would do when they do these studies is please weigh the cow. Cuz my guess is she's doing what, like all mammals.
Mike Van Amburgh (30:51):
Yeah, she's putting it on her back. She's not gonna waste it. She's not gonna make more heat. And I think that's a real big miss in all of this work is that we're not looking at where she's secreting these nutrients, right? So, so I think that's something we have to, if we're gonna do anything, start weighing the cows. If you go down here, if you look at the essentials, you see a nice jump here, but not so much on the total amino acids. I always find these responses confusing when you just do essential amino acids or you do all amino acids and you don't see the same response. That seems counterintuitive to me that you're, you're given it the same amount of essential amino acids. So why adding the non-essentials doesn't seem to take it away that unless you're just saturating something, right? Here's another one of those studies.
Mike Van Amburgh (31:39):
These cows are 61 days in milk. They used caseine profile and a three to one lice of methionine. And here's the amount of infusion on the essentials and the amount infused per day on the non-essentials. And you know, again, eight cows 61 days amaal infusion, four treatments control essential non-essential totals. 72% of mp and they're using a hundred percent of N E l, right? When we pull this up, sorry, these are a little bit light here. You know, this is interesting. These cows are not eating a lot. They're at 16, 15 to 16 kilograms of dry matter intake, right? So my first, again, but this is one of those studies that we look at, is there a huge energy demand on these cows now, right? So I don't want to discount it completely, but it's one of those where I say, ah, these are not high producing cows, right?
Mike Van Amburgh (32:33):
I got cows that are at 26 to 28 and 29 and 30 kilos now, right? So moving towards twice that and they're twice as much milk, you know? So I, I look at this study and I go, this is interesting, but I'm not sure if we're gonna learn anything from it, but I'm gonna show it to you because this is what's out there, right? You do control versus essential. And you see about three kilograms of milk. You do non-essentials, you don't see anything you do total and you see 37.9. So you pick up about a kilo from essential to adding the non-essentials on fat from 9 76. So, so not, you know, 60 grams nothing much there. When you look at totals, crude protein, nice jump on the essentials. Not much with the non-essentials total. It comes back up. But again, not a lot of synergy here.
Mike Van Amburgh (33:20):
Lactose is the same thing, right? Fats these cows are milk fat, depressed 29 2 8 2 9 2 6, they're actually inverted. So again, I think they have some probably not great room in fermentation there. There's just a lot of things going on there, right? So I'm not sure this is, again, this is out there. I felt like I needed it to show it to you, but we're kind of going, eh, I don't really think that this is probably the right model. Here's the right model. So this is a study out of I think Netherlands vallow 20 21 9 Holstein cows calving to 50 days in milk, right? So we're hitting them up early. Lactation non-essential amino acid infusions in fresh cows. Two treatments, total amino acids are essential amino acids using a Caine profile. Amaal infusions right? Now, these girls on the other hand told us what, yeah, I need those non-essentials.
Mike Van Amburgh (34:18):
I really need those non-essentials, okay? Early lactation just initiated lactation. Huge demand. So this is the other thing we gotta learn. If we're gonna study this, where do we have to do it? Early lactation when there's a high demand, right? When the resources are going to be limited. And I think that's the key here, is we've gotta figure out how to upgrade our model a little bit and be working with cows that truly have a high metabolic demand. We can't do this in, we can't do it in an easy mid lactation cow cuz everybody else is done with them
Mike Van Amburgh (35:07):
But notice what happened, right? Here's the essentials, here's the total amino acids. You got nine kilograms of milk, you got 18 to 20 pounds of milk. Holy crap, right? That's a big deal. So can we get rid of Metabolizable protein? Absolutely not. This is the best example I have of that when somebody says, oh, van Amberg, we can just balance on essential amino acids Uhuh. We're not gonna do that. All right? So, you know, and, and just to, to finish up here, one more metabolism slide. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this. This was from Rodrigo Milano's PhD when he was wor or masters actually when he was working on B vitamins. I did this simply to come down here and introduce this I down in some one carbon metabolism here. So methyl donors and you know, I know I'm doing a ball camm talk, but I still think this is real and we should be framing this out, right? So, Coleen, is cole a required or essential? Is it required or essential? Is it non-essential? What do you guys think? Come on, somebody. Gimme an answer. You're not gonna offend Clay. He's not gonna kick you out of you say no
Mike Van Amburgh (36:28):
Well, I think it's required. It's definitely essential in my book, right? And because it is essential, what should we be doing in our nutrition models? We should be framing out a requirement. We should be doing that just like everything else, right? You know, it's, it's, it's, it's in one carbon metabolism. It makes the efficiency of use of methionine better, right? It's doing all sorts of things that we need to, we need to pay attention to. And there's data, right? It'd be one thing if there weren't data, right? But there's data. So we, I've only got one slide on this, but if you look at the meta-analysis from Arshad in 2020, you know, and you look at, you know, feeding choline and dry mein intake postpartum, you see a reasonable increase. If you look at milk yield, energy corrected milk yield and feeding choline, there's a response, right?
Mike Van Amburgh (37:22):
To, to me as a modeler, I look at that and go, I need to figure out how to put some sort of a requirement in there cuz I think it makes a cow more efficient because she's not spending time using other methyl donors, right? If we don't give her choline, what's she gotta do? She's gotta find some other methyl donor that maybe is less efficient, right? But if we take it away, we make her energetic efficiency better. If we give it, sorry, if we give it to her, we make her energetic efficiency better, right? And to me, this is all about energy efficiency, right? So put it in there, 1.1 pounds, dry matter intake, 4.8 pounds of energy corrected milk. Fairly uniform response to me. And this is the conversation I had with clay a month ago or whenever we, we had breakfast. I, I'm comfortable if we can get the right kind of data, starting to figure out how to frame this because the data are coming.
Mike Van Amburgh (38:17):
We've got a lot of data now that all say what cows are going a certain direction when we put that in the diet. We just, you know, how many grams when, what is it play off of? Does it interact with methionine? Does it change the methin requirement? Does it increase the methin requirement? I don't know all of those. That's where Heather, maybe you can help us figure out how to do that, right? And, and frame it out in a way that we can make a better prediction. Okay. Just to summarize, the data would suggest that high producing cattle have requirements for nutrients that are deemed non-essential as productivity increases. There are different stages of lactation nutrient resources become more limiting for all pathways. And this could be energy amino acids or something like a methyl donor. Terms like metabolizable protein are gonna remain useful as it captures the supply of non-essential amino acids. And we need to consider non-essential nutrients like required nutrients and start to describe the requirements in nutritional models. Right?
Scott Sorrell (39:09):
So Clay Mike talked a lot about the differences between essential and required. Could you just summarize for, for me and the audience what the key differences are between essential and required?
Speaker 3 (39:21):
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Dr. Clay Zimmerman (39:46):
Yeah, so the first of all, you know anyone that's taken a nutrition class, you know, the example that Mike used talking about amino acids, I think pretty much everyone is familiar with essential amino acids versus not essential amino acids. So the def the definition of an essential nutrient, first of all, it's one that, you know, it's one that is needed by the body, you know, either for maintenance or production or reproduction. But the key thing that makes it essential is it cannot be produced and endogenously by the body. You know, our, the mammalian cell cells cannot produce that nutrient. So, you know, the essential amino acids, the 10 essential amino acids, they cannot be produced by mammalian tissues. Now the ruminants is a little bit different, right? The ruen microbes can produce all of the amino acids, the essentials and non-essentials. But it, it's a very good nutritional analogy to think about.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (40:54):
First of all, essential versus non-essential, essential from an amino acid standpoint required nutrients are nutrients that can be made from other metabolites that can be synthesized or inter convert, converted. So they are required, a required nutrient is required by the animal for some productive function. You know, again, you know, maintenance, production, reproduction, you know, maybe immune response. You know, a a required nutrient is required by the animal for some function. So if we think about amino acids, they have to be provided in the diet in a, in a mammal but not essential amino acids. They can be produced in the body, but in a high producing dairy cow, some of the non-essential amino acids probably are required. They need to be provided in the diet at higher levels. And that, that was the case that, that Mike was making during his presentation, is just because an amino acid is not essential, it may be required in these higher producing cows.
Scott Sorrell (42:22):
Hmm. Yeah.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (42:24):
Nice
Scott Sorrell (42:24):
And clay.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (42:25):
Yeah, I thought he did a very nice job using that analogy. I think all nutritionists can relate to that. The amino acid example.
Scott Sorrell (42:34):
Yeah. You know, another aspect of his talk that I found intriguing was the meta-analysis that had been been done with choline. Can you kind of give us some of the key takeaways from that research? Clay, I know you know it well.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (42:47):
Yeah, so basically, you know, it, it, it was a it was, it's the latest published meta-analysis on feeding rumor protected calling during the transition period. It was published in 2020 out of Jose Santo's lab in journal dairy science. And it you know, it, it, it looked at the 21 peer reviewed studies at that time where, where rumor protected choline had been fed during the transition period. So Mike used that basically at the end of the talk to make the case that that choline is a required nutrient in transition dairy cows based on the meta-analysis. And really, you know, the key points there, you know, one is the consistency of response in, in almost every study when you supplement room protected coaling, you get an increase in milk, in milk production and energy corrected milk production. There really have only been one or two published studies where there wasn't really, you know, a significant response from a production standpoint.
Dr. Clay Zimmerman (44:06):
The second, really the second point is cows respond at all levels of production. So they were, you know, they, there were there was a study where the control cows were only averaging about 45 pounds of milk, and there was a nice response to colon supplementation. The highest producing cows were the control cows were close to a hundred pounds of, of milk, and they still responded really in the same way. The average, the average response the average milk response in a meta-analysis was about three and a half pounds of milk. And the average energy-corrected milk was higher than that. About four, about four pounds of milk in, in the meta-analysis.
Scott Sorrell (44:58):
Well, thank you for that summary, clay. If anyone would like to view Dr. Van Hamburger's complete webinar and slides, go to alchem.com/real science and scroll down to the 2022 Cornell Mini Symposia. You'll find all four presentations there. Clay, as always, that's great happening here as my co-host. Thank you for joining us for this conversation and I look forward to our next podcast in the series, new revelations in transition Cow Nutrition with Dr. Joce Santos from the University of Florida To our loyal listeners, thank you for coming along for more than 60 episodes and sticking with us as we explore more topics. We hope to see you next time here at Real Science Exchange, where it's always a happy hour and you're always among friends.
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