Abstract: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of adding different vegetable oils or fat to basal diet on the meat quality, cholesterol content and fatty acid composition of breast and thigh muscles of Arbor Acre (AA) broilers. Totally 648 one-day-old chickens were randomly divided into 6 groups: CON (fed basal diet mainly consisting of corn meal and soybean meal as normal control), SO (fed basal diet added with soybean oil as positive control), LO (fed basal diet added with lard as negative control), COP (fed basal diet added with commercial complex vegetable oil sample mainly containing palm oil), COC (fed basal diet added with commercial complex vegetable oil sample mainly containing coconut oil) and COV (fed basal diet added with commercial complex vegetable oil sample containing multiple vegetable oils). Each chicken was fed for 42 days. The results showed that: (1) Drip loss (24 h postmortem) of breast muscle in COP group was significantly increased (P ＜ 0.05) and cooking loss of thigh muscle in COC group was significantly decreased (P ＜ 0.05). (2) Breast ratio of unsaturated to saturated fatty acids in LO group was improved (P ＜ 0.05); more n-3 PUFAs were determined in SO, LO, COP and COC groups (P ＜ 0.05); compared with CON group, the contents of n-6 PUFAs in SO and COC groups were higher (P ＜ 0.05) and the ratio of n-6 to n-3 PUFAs in the other four groups except COV group was lower (P ＜ 0.05). (3) The content of cholesterol in breast muscle from SO group was lower than that in the other four groups except LO group (P ＜ 0.05). These results indicated that the feeding vegetables oils and lard to broilers could increase PUFA content in the breast muscle and have no adverse effect on meat quality. Soybean oil could change the proportion of fatty acids in the breast muscle and reduce cholesterol level.

Key words: oil, meat quality, fatty acid composition, cholesterol, broiler