Effects of the dietary inclusion of vegetable fat and dehydrated alfalfa meal on the technological properties of rabbit meat

There is an ever-growing interest in the use of vegetable diets in animal nutrition with the aim of improving food safety to defend and promote the health of consumers. The dietary use of linseed (whole seed or oil) in animal feeding has been proposed by many authors to obtain meat with raised PUFA, mainly alpha-linolenic acid (C18:3 n-3) (Enser, 1999; Matthews et al., 2000; Riley et al., 2000; Rey et al., 2001). However, increasing amounts of PUFA could impair the shelf life of meat products by increasing their susceptibility to lipid oxidation during storage and further processing (Morrissey et al., 1998). A study was conducted to investigate the effects of the dietary inclusion of whole linseed and dehydrated lucerne meal (DLM) on some functional traits and on the susceptibility to lipid oxidation of rabbit meat.