Nowadays, people not only pursue quality-assured meat, but also pay close attention to functional meat products for their life quality and health. Consumer's increasing interest for maintaining or improving their health by eating these specific meat products has led to animal nutritionists devote themselves to research of this kind.

Tea saponins (TS) are one of the most important active components in tea and tea seed meal and its resultant nutritional and physiological functions have encouraged its application in research and livestock production systems. Dietary TS supplementation can improve the performance of growing lambs and meat quality and decrease lipid oxidation for ruminants.

Prof. TAN Zhiliang’s research group has applied tea extract as additive on digestion and livestock products quality manipulation in ruminant. Dr. ZHOU Chuanshe and his colleagues used TS extracted from tea leaves (Ilex kudingcha C.J. Tseng) on ruminal fermentation, digestibility and plasma antioxidant parameters in goats. The dietary supplementation levels were from 0 to 800 mg TS/kg？DM. The results showed that the plasma content of triacylglycerols (TG) declined linearly with increasing TS inclusion, indicating that healthy goat meat with low blood lipids would be possible to be produced when TS were supplemented in goat diet. They also found that the major plasma antioxidant parameters content (glutathione peroxidase, GSH-Px; malondialdehyde, MDA; superoxidase dismutase, SOD) achieved the most optimal level when the dietary supplementation was 600 mg TS/kg？DM, indicating higher antioxidant status of goats and better cellular defence against diseases such as cancer. It would help produce functional goat meat for prevention of cardiac-cerebral diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and atherosclerosis.

This research has enriched our knowledge of production of healthy livestock products by application of plant extract as additive in ruminant husbandry. The main findings of this study have published on Animal Feed Science and Technology (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377840112002520).