Phosphorus nutrition of growing pigs

Phosphorus (P) is an essential nutrient for diverse biological processes, which aggregate to the animal's requirement for P, and nutritionists strive to meet this requirement accurately. The P demand for a growing pig comprises requirements for maintenance and tissue deposition. The P in feed ingredients, however, must be digested and absorbed before its ultimate partition between the 2 aforementioned requirement components. Phosphorus from various sources could behave differently during digestion and absorption, which results in their disparate bioavailability for pigs. The system of standardized total tract digestibility reflects true total tract digestibility of P and feed ingredient effects on specific endogenous P loss with relative ease of implementation, and this system guarantees satisfactory additivity in digestible P among the ingredients in a diet—the foundation for diet formulation. The basal endogenous P loss, which is much easier to measure than the specific endogenous P loss, is considered as part of the pig's maintenance requirement. With this arrangement, a digestibility framework is established both for measuring the P-providing capacity of various feed ingredients and for describing the pig's P requirement. This framework entails basic understanding of the function, digestion, absorption, excretion, and homeostasis of P as support pillars. Understanding the workings of this framework enables potential integration of factors such as environment conditions and disease status in future P requirement models. The current review discusses dietary sources, digestion, absorption, bioavailability and requirement of P for growing pigs to understand the status quo, revealing the points of consensus as well as those of debate, and to encourage further investigation to provide more clarity.