Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2017
The carbohydrate portion of dietary fibre is increasingly being measured as non-starch polysaccharides (NSP). Unlike the more traditional, indirect gravimetric methods of measuring dietary fibre such as the crude fibre, acid detergent fibre, or neutral detergent fibre (NDF) techniques, the NSP method is a direct measurement of the monomeric constituents of the carbohydrate portion of the fibre fraction. Neutral NSP monomers are measured by gas chromatography of alditol acetate derivatives of acid hydrolysates of destarched samples, whereas the acidic sugars in the hydrolysates are determined by colorimetry (EnglystandCummings, 1984) or decarboxylation (Theander and Aman, 1979). As it has been shown that mode of drying can affect the values obtained for fibre determined gravimetrically by the NDF technique (Deinum and Maassen, 1994), it is important to know if NSP values are similarly affected. Therefore the effects of oven drying versus freeze drying on the NSP values obtained for various temperate forages was assessed.