Nutrients Other Than Cell Walls Are Also Subject to Fermentative Digestion
The fermentative digestion of plant cell-wall material and its importance to herbivore digestion are well known. In addition, however, essentially all protein and carbohydrate nutrients that can provide substrate for energy and growth in mammals can also support the similar needs of microbes.
Therefore, almost all dietary protein and carbohydrate are potentially subject to fermentative digestion. This fact is especially important in ruminants, in which food is exposed to fermentative digestion in the forestomach before its arrival at sites of glandular digestion. This temporal arrangement leads to the fermentative digestion of many nutrients that would otherwise have been available to the animal through glandular digestion. Thus, forestomach fermentative digestion, which provides for the efficient use of plant cell walls, can potentially lead to the inefficient use of other nutrients because of microbial alteration.
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