The Value of Antioxidants in a Complete Ration

My name is Wendell Knehans. I work in the Product Management area focused on antioxidants, enzymes, and a few other products.

Antioxidant products, as they're looked at from a nutritionist and from feed producers' perspective, are a very interesting category. If you just look at the AGRISTATS data, for example, things like antioxidants, and mold inhibitors, and other items that don't have a true nutritional direct contribution don't get credit for energy, or vitamins, et cetera, in the animal model. So when I look at antioxidants, what they do is make the other ingredients work better.

When you look at antioxidants, what we do is take the investment in Vitamin E, for example, and make sure that the full potential of that makes it into the animal's system as opposed to it degrading with oxidation. When we have an antioxidant in that system, it sacrifices itself first, so it spares the Vitamin E so it can go into the animal's system, meet the Vitamin E need for the animal, improve the immune system, and in the best case scenario, have a higher Vitamin E status in the meat coming out of that animal, which has the potential to increase shelf life, would be one example.

You know, another example is when you look at the oils and meals going into diets, again, those are energy sources. We put the antioxidant with those energy sources, ideally as quickly as possible after production, so that stabilizes them at that point and, again, gives the animal the full benefit of those as opposed to losing energy through oxidation prior to the time the animal gets the benefit of that in their dietary system.

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