Effect of extrusion, espansion and toasting on the nutritional value of peas, faba beans and lupins

Abstract

An assessment was made of the effect that different treatments (toasting, expansion, extrusion) have on the nutritionalvalue of protein plants (pea, faba bean, lupin). In a randomized block design, feeds were screened for enzymaticdigestibility of starch and protein, N solubility and in vitro protein degradability. Expansion and extrusion cause increasedstarch enzymatic degradability while toasting produced virtually no effects. In peas this value increased from 11.80% inmeal to 39.70% in the extruded product; 85.37% is the percentage for the expanded product, while 10.90% is the starchdigestibility value for toasted peas. In faba beans the extrusion process increased starch digestibility from 11.39% to85.05%, while in extruded lupins a complete starch hydrolysis was obtained, while in the meal the polysaccharide digestionwas 54.48%.The expansion and extrusion processes significantly decreased rumen degradability during the first 8 hours of incubation.Toasted peas had lower degradability if compared with controls but not with the other treatments. The onlypotentially alternative source to soybean is the extruded faba bean. In spite of its lower protein content, this feed ischaracterized by a considerably lower in vitro protein degradability than soybean. This implies that the digestible foodprotein content is comparable (124.90 g/kg DM) to that of soybean (109.78 g/kg DM) and definitely higher than thatof all other protein plants.

Keywords

• Legumes, Nutritional value, Technological treatments, Digestibility