Tag: Ileal digestibility

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) formally recommended replacing the older Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS) with the Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score (DIAAS) in 2013. This change aimed to address significant limitations in how we measure protein quality, marking a new era in nutritional science.

Protein digestibility, the measure of how much protein is absorbed by the body, is far more accurately measured at the ileal level than at the fecal level. This is because the end of the small intestine (the ileum) is where protein absorption ceases, and undigested protein reaching the large intestine is metabolized by microbes, skewing total-tract measurements.