Abstract
The study is intended to explore the effects of different feeding modes on the trace elements in Chinese local chicken breast meat and leg meat. The experiment was conducted with the adoption of 600 San Huang chicks after a 21-day brooding and then 500 healthy breeding chickens in close weight were randomly assigned to two processing modes, that is, indoor floor and free-range, with 10 replicates per system and each of them contains 25 chickens. On the sixty-third day of breeding, 20 chickens were randomly selected from two different feeding modes, slaughtered after corona, carcass dissected after cooling with a viewing to collecting the samples of chest muscle and leg muscle.
Then the method of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry is applied to determine in samples the contents of zinc, copper, selenium, manganese, iron, chromium, lead, cadmium and mercury. The results showed that the free-range breeding way is more favourable as the contents of zinc, iron, manganese and chromium in leg meat is significantly higher than those in indoor-floor rearing system (P < 0.01), while the content of selenium in breast is also significantly higher than that of in indoor-floor rearing system (P < 0.05). Instead, the content of copper in breast in indoor-floor rearing mode is significantly higher than free-range mode (P < 0.05). However, the cadmium content (0.0016 mg/kg) in leg meat in free-range chickens is significantly higher than that indoor-floor breeding mode (0.0010 mg/kg). That is far less than the content of the maximum allowable chicken sample cadmium content (0.1 mg/kg) in the value of China’s food limited standard in pollutants.
