The effect of feeding method on body weight gains, concentrations of selected components in the blood, and peroxidation processes of carp, Cyprinus carpio L.

Recent years marked a major shift in human understanding of the role of food products in maintaining their proper health status. A particular interest was focused on the role of foodstuffs on prophylaxis and prevention of so called diseases of civilization such as: obesity, non-insulin-dependant diabetes mellitus, circulatory diseases, and neoplastic diseases. It has been explicitly demonstrated in extensive epidemiological studies that n-3 and n-6 fatty acids show remarkable physiological and health-oriented properties (Ziemlanski and Budzynska-Topolowska 1992, Budzynska-Topolowska and Ziemlanski 1993, Kolanowski and Œwiderski 1997, Ziemlanski 1997, Arts et al. 2001,). The excellent source of these acids are fish, either free-living ones, acquired from the sea, or increasingly important cultured ones (Steffens and Wirth 2005). This imposes an obligation on fish-farmers to produce fish of, not only, adequate body weight and gustatory values but also of good condition and having specific customer-demanded nutrients, in this number proper lipid levels, of proper quality. The presently reported study was aimed at determining the effect of lipidand carbohydrate-enhanced diets on selected blood parameters, reduced glutathione (GSH) content, lipid peroxidation products (MDA) concentrations in the liver, as well as on body weight gains in carp fry reared intensively in post-cooling waters.