Evaluation of hippuric acid content in goat milk as a marker of feeding regimen

Organic producers, traders, and consumers must address 2 issues related to milk: authentication of the production system and nutritional differentiation. The presence of hippuric acid (HA) in goat milk samples has been proposed as a possible marker to differentiate the feeding regimen of goats. The objective of this work is to check the hypothesis that HA could be a marker for the type of feeding regimen of goats by studying the influence of production system (conventional or organic) and feeding regimen (with or without grazing fodder). With this purpose, commercial cow and goat milk samples (n = 27) and raw goat milk samples (n = 185; collected from different breeds, localizations, and dates) were analyzed. Samples were grouped according to breed, feeding regimen, production system, and origin to compare HA content by ANOVA and honestly significant difference Tukey test at a confidence level of ≥95%. Hippuric acid content was obtained by analyzing milk samples with capillary electrophoresis. This method was validated by analyzing part of the samples with HPLC as a reference technique. Sixty-nine raw goat milk samples (of the total 158 samples analyzed in this work) were quantified by capillary electrophoresis. In these samples, the lowest average content for HA was 7 ± 3 mg/L. This value corresponds to a group of conventional raw milk samples from goats fed with compound feed. The highest value of this group was 28 ± 10 mg/L, corresponding to goats fed compound feed plus grass. Conversely, for organic raw goat milk samples, the highest concentration was 67 ± 14 mg/L, which corresponds to goats fed grass. By contrast, the lowest value of this organic group was 26 ± 10 mg/L, which belongs to goats fed organic compounds. Notice that the highest HA average content was found in samples from grazing animals corresponding to the organic group. This result suggests that HA is a good marker to determine the type of goats feeding regimen; a high content of HA represents a diet based mainly or exclusively on eating green grass (grazing), independently of the production system. Hence, this marker would not be useful for the actual organic policies to distinguish organic milk under the current regulations, because organic dairy ruminants can be fed organic compound feed and conserved fodder without grazing at all.