Abstract

Background:
Many types of medicinal plants have a positive effect when added as feed additives in the diets of animal models, particularly experimental diabetic animals.

Aim:
This research aimed to investigate the impact of adding two levels of grind carob seeds to the diet on the growth of domestic male rabbits.

Methods:
20 male domestic growing rabbits were used and divided into four groups. The first group was fed a basal diet without any treatment and kept as control negative (first treatment), the second group was alloxan injected to induce experimental diabetes and received a basal diet, while third and fourth groups also induced diabetes by alloxan injected and fed a same Basale diet including 1% and 3% grind carob seeds to each group, respectively.

Results:
The results showed that animals in both the third and fourth groups revealed gradual improvement in general health status with the progress of the experimental period especially in body weight and, feed intake, while there was a decrease in cortisol and glucagon hormone levels and depression in both glucose and insulin ranges in compare to control positive (diabetic group); whereas, the control negative group was still in normal standard health status.

Conclusion:
From the present results it might be concluded that the grinded carob seed supplementation appeared to have obvious positive effects in the two groups suffering from experiment diabetic mellitus, due to avoiding those animals from the deleterious effects of such illness, especially in the group that received 3% carob seed.

Key words: Basal diet, Carob seeds, Diabetic mellitus, Feed intake, Health status