For decades, farmers have added low levels of antibiotics to chicken feed to boost the animals’ growth and prevent infection. But the risk of resistance to antibiotics has led dozens of countries to ban or limit their blanket use in livestock. As a result, researchers are looking for replacements with the benefits of antibiotics but not the downsides. They’re also aiming to improve meat quality, which is diminished by rapid growth from selective breeding and nutrient-dense feeds. A new study has found that one attractive option may be pomegranate peels.
Pomegranate peels are known to contain a variety of potentially beneficial compounds, including an antioxidant called ellagic acid. Preliminary research has shown that ellagic acid may improve growth and meat quality, as well as gut health and egg production in poultry. That made researchers wonder if pomegranate peel, an inexpensive waste product, could help fight inflammation in chickens, which can restrict growth and lower meat quality.
To test the power of the peel, scientists in China gave 216 chickens lipopolysaccharide, a toxin from the cell walls of gram-negative bacteria, to induce inflammation. They fed a group of chickens a control diet and supplemented the diets of other chickens with 300 mg/kg of powder made from pomegranate peel (J. Agric. Food Chem. 2026, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.6c00714).
The chickens that consumed pomegranate peel had significantly less inflammation. Their meat was pinker, juicier, and more tender than that of the control chickens.
“I’m seeing this as part of the toolbox of a multidimensional feed additive,” says Lyndy McGaw, leader of the phytomedicine program at the University of Pretoria, who was not involved in the study.
McGaw says that if further trials prove pomegranate peel to be beneficial, it could be combined with prebiotics, probiotics, essential oils, and other compounds in chicken feed, because one compound alone is unlikely to replicate the benefits of antibiotics.
To find the part of pomegranate peel responsible for the positive effects, the researchers used mass spectrometry to identify 30 of its components. Ellagic acid and the antioxidant punicalagin were the most abundant. They used computer programs to identify which components could interact with key inflammatory proteins identified in the chicken feed experiment. Again, ellagic acid and punicalagin were the best matches.
But punicalagin breaks down easily and can be converted into ellagic acid, and further modeling revealed that ellagic acid binds strongly with the target inflammatory molecules. Its extract produces the same anti-inflammatory effects in chickens, the researchers confirm.
This provides “very convincing evidence,” that ellagic acid is the main compound at play, McGaw says. “It’s known to have very good antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity.”
Although the study is “a step in the right direction,” it was set in a controlled environment with chickens in clean cages. On farms, chickens are kept in crowded floor pens atop litter—a mix of bedding, feathers, and poop, says Ayodeji Aderibigbe, an assistant professor of poultry nutrition at the Ohio State University. “You have to test it in both scenarios,” he says.
