Vitamin C the ‘Magic Bullet’ for Poultry Production during Heat Stress: A Review

Domesticated animals are homeothermic animals, including poultry. This means they are warm-blooded animals and usually maintains their relatively constant internal body temperature. This means that they have a relatively uniform temperature maintained almost independent of the environmental temperature. Therefore, they are usually productive when they are within their comfortable thermo-neutral zone of ambient temperature ranges. Consequently, maintenance of the relative constancies of poultry of their internal environment depends on behavioural interactions with the external environment as well as automatic adjustments within the body. Nutrient, fluid and thermal balance cannot be maintained in the long run without appropriate control of the behavioural activities of eating, drinking and selection of a favourable thermal environment. In each case, these behavioural activities contribute to homeostasis by adjusting the rate of exchange of the regulated quantity of nutrients, fluid or heat between the external environment and the interior of the body in such a way as to favour the constancy of the body’s content of each quantity. In the tropics, particularly during the dry seasons or summer periods birds usually find themselves outside the comfortable environmental temperature resulting in heat stress. During heat stress, heat increment emanating from nutrient digestion surges resulting to birds going off feed as a physiological response that significantly results in poor performance and other productive indices. In this circumstance, vitamin C has been shown to be the ‘magic bullet’ of importance in managing heat stress in poultry production. This is very important, especially in the tropic where heat stress is endemic.