Calcium Soap from Palm Fatty Acid Distillate for Ruminant Feed: Analysis of Antioxidant

Dairy cows often get metabolic disorders and low milk productions during lactating periods because the animals don't have adequate feed supply and use only the food reserves from their body. Supplementary fat is known to provide sufficient energy but creating problem with fiber digestion in the rumen. The calcium salt of fatty acids is being used to solve the problem. The mixture of such soaps with cattle's regular feed can increase the yield, the number of fats, and the gross energy in cattle's milk. Palm fatty acid distillate (PFAD) can serve the fatty acids needed for calcium soap production, also have the role as the natural source of antioxidants for the products as it has several bioactive compounds including vitamin E (mainly as tocotrienols), phytosterols, and squalene. Those components are believed to have the good impact for cows, and it has a good oxidation resistance. This research studied the possibility of those antioxidants for being derived to the products after the reaction occurred by using the 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) assay, a widely and commonly-used spectrophotometric method to measure the radical scavenging activity. By using ethanol, the half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) of PFAD and calcium soap are 60.4 mu g/ml and 487.6 mu g/ml respectively, while using methanol the results are 49.9 mu g/ml for PFAD and 256.6 mu g/ml for the soap. There must be some antioxidants in the product after the reaction, despite the small number. The loss of antioxidants might be caused by several factors, one of them is the reaction temperature as antioxidants are thermally sensitive.