In this episode of Ruminate This, Dr. Larry Roth, Vice President of Nutrition at Agrarian Solutions, discusses the science behind LivOx, the next evolution of DTX™ and BioCycle Plus. This proprietary blend of plant-based actives, including curcumin, naringin, and carnosic acid, is redefining mycotoxin mitigation, gut health, and liver protection in cattle.
Dr. Roth discusses how LivOx strengthens intestinal integrity, enhances nutrient absorption, and protects the liver, ultimately improving milk production and reproductive performance. Backed by extensive research, including groundbreaking CaCO2 cell studies, this episode explores why this next generation of DTX and BioCycle Plus is unlike anything else on the market.
🎧 Listen now to set your herd up for lifelong success!
Scott Zehr
All right. Hey, welcome everybody to another episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I’m your host, Scott Zehr. And today we are going to be talking with Dr. Larry Roth once again. So Larry, thank you for taking time out of your day today.
And today’s call, we are going to dive a little deeper into the DTX enhancement that we shared with, shared with the rest of the world back there in January and episode 33, the next generation of DTX, which dropped on January 20th.
And when I say dive a little deeper, I give a lot of credit to Dr. Roth and the leadership here at Agrarian identifying such a strategic relationship with our source of LivOx. And, there’s a reason we wanted to move forward with this enhancement. I mean, there’s a reason we wanted to make DTX, which was already really, in my opinion, and according to certain research, Larry, the best mycotoxin mitigation product on the market.
And it’s not very often we get to make the best, better. And so just to give folks a little more of an insight as to what this enhancement means and what LivOx can potentially do for our cattle, I have Dr. Roth in here and we’re going to dive into the data behind LivOx. And I’ll just let people know up front, some of this stuff, just, the first time I saw it, my mouth dropped open and it was like, wow, this is impressive.
So this is going to be more of a slideshow thing. So for those of you listening on a traditional podcast platform, Spotify or Apple podcast, you can jump over to YouTube to watch the video slideshow. And also you can email us [email protected] and we can also get you the information that way. So Dr. Roth, anything you want to say before we jump into it?
Dr. Larry Roth
Now, Scott, I just appreciate this opportunity to unveil more of the research. There’s so much research behind this. And, you know, we had to make a decision to strategically release the research behind it. Because otherwise, it’s like drinking from a fire hose. And there’s a lot of this that I just sit there and go through it, and this is mind bending. And so…
Scott Zehr
I would agree with that a hundred percent.
Dr. Larry Roth
Yeah, I’m a geek enough, that man, if you were to just start playing all of this out there, people’s minds would glaze over, I think. So we want to strategically bring this out.
Scott Zehr
I’ll be honest there. When you dropped the bomb to me of carnosic acid in the research there, my mind was bent. It was, I give you guys a lot of credit there. So yeah, whenever you’re ready, Larry, let’s dive right in.
Dr. Larry Roth
All right. Thanks, Scott. Yeah. So let’s, jump into this PowerPoint presentation here, defending and protecting dairy cattle. You know, my bias as a nutritionist is that the digestive tract is the most important part of the animal.
So often we put an emphasis on absorbing nutrients, and certainly that is important. But perhaps equally as important is the role of the digestive tract for protecting the rest of the body. Keeping the barbarians, keeping the bad stuff in the digestive tract and not allowing it into the body. So let’s talk today about how we’re going to further defend and protect digestive tract integrity and how we’re going to defend and protect the liver.
So, one of my favorite little cartoon drawings looking at defending and protecting the digestive tract. Scott, we start over here on the left with relatively healthy epithelial cells responsible for absorbing nutrients. But again, serving that castle wall. And in between we have the tight junctions. And they’re supposed to be tight, because if we lose those tight junctions, we’ve got what I like to refer to as the interstate highway for bad stuff to drive right into the body.
In the past, we have focused on the role of the lactoform bacteria for activating the transport protein systems that kick mycotoxins out of the cell. And this little guy right here shows what happens if we don’t have the lactoform bacteria. If we’re not cleaning up the cells, then the mycotoxins are able to get into the cell, cause it to die, split it open, and that’s another avenue for mycotoxins, pathogens, and just other digestive components to get into the body to cause an inflammation load.
So, let’s think about this: tissues in the gut lining and liver require a lot of nutrients to repair themselves. There’s already a tremendous nutrient load from turnover, but then we have to repair the cells because of damage. That’s extra nutrients that are required. So the dairy producer, the producer is already paying for the nutrients. Then if we lose digestive tract integrity, those nutrients aren’t going to productive purposes. They’re going back to just trying to stay alive.
Scott Zehr
So, Larry, what you’re talking about here is what we would refer to commonly as leaky gut, right?
Dr. Larry Roth
You bet. Leaky gut?
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth
And what can we do to have nutrient allocation go as it’s supposed to? For the most productive purposes. So let’s think of the immune system. The body’s military. It needs glucose to operate. And the county’s glucose to make milk, no glucose, no lactose, no milk. Glucose is also needed as a carbon source for rapidly developing cells such as oligocytes to become eggs and become embryos.
So the immune system is functioning at a high level it’s going to need a lot of glucose and other nutrients. So, we want to prevent leaky gut. And we want proper nutrient allocation. We’ve talked in the past about DTX modes of action. We’ve always been talking about defend digestive tract integrity for reasons we just mentioned.
We want to protect against mycotoxin related inflammation. Help nutrients go where they’re supposed to. And we talk about the liver being so important as the body’s biochemical factory responsible for detoxification as well as nutrient transformation. It all comes back to nutrient allocation.
In the past, we have talked about the research study that we showed that DTX will improve both milk production and reproductive performance. And you’ve seen this slide before where we talk about the conclusions. Two and a half pounds of milk, per cow per day for multiple lactation cows during the first 150 days.
And then for all cows, improving preg rates, measured as pregnancies per service from both AI and ET. So Scott, that’s, that’s lactoform by itself. That’s what we have today in DTX. But now what we’re going to do is enhance what we’ve already done.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, Larry, just to, just to jump in on that last slide. That to me is a slide that probably, I know we talk about it a lot. But you want to talk about mind bending research, like we were talking about at the beginning of this podcast, show me another mycotoxin mitigation product on the marketplace that has this kind of research.
Dr. Larry Roth
Yeah. 920 cows.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth
So, good research. Good research. But let’s talk about the future. So we want to keep lactoform, the cell wall deficient bacteria there. But we brought in the proprietary blend of natural plant actives that we call LivOx, liver oxidative support. So talk about digestive tract integrity. Go back to that first cartoon drawing that I showed you, we want to protect liver health.
So we have a partner that has 30 years of experience with the plant molecules. So we’re moving beyond plant extracts, the essential oils, the flavors. We’re getting down to the individual plant molecules that actually provide the benefits that we’re after. What’s the benefits of that? We don’t need to put in as much dry matter because we’ve got the actual molecules.
We don’t need everything else. And when we understand how these plant molecules work, we can go get the actual molecules that we want for this specific purpose. Now the neat part of this is Agrarian has exclusive U.S rights to this technology. So, Turmeric. Turmeric is a member of the ginger family. You see ginger root there.
Naringin, that’s the plant extract that comes from citrus peels. So we’re using turmeric and naringin to support digestive tract integrity. And then we have rosemary to protect not just liver tissues, but other tissues in the body as well. I would rather talk about the plant actives, curcumin and naringin.
Let’s talk about what they do and look at some of the research. Carnosic acid, a very powerful antioxidant. We’ll show some of that research in greater depth. So here’s a molecule of curcumin in the upper right hand corner. Curcumin defends the tight junctions by strengthening the protein structure.
We’ll look at that in more depth on the next slide. It all comes back to protecting intestinal epithelial integrity. So you’ve got the lactoform bacteria to protect against this happening. So we have the good healthy cell. Good healthy cell, but look here, we’ve got open tight junctions. Not with curcumin around.
Curcumin is going to enter the epithelial cell and is going to strengthen those tight junctions. Well, sort of. You see, curcumin is very poorly absorbed. Curcumin gets into the cells through passive influx. In other words, not the active transport proteins that a large molecule such as a mycotoxin would require.
Or lysine and amino acid, the curcumin is a much smaller molecule than the mycotoxin. So curcumin is able to go in passively. But there are some challenges getting them curcumin molecule into the cell. So that’s where we need naringin to come into play to improve the curcumin passive entry into the cell.
So you’re going to see competitors who have curcumin on their label, or more accurately, they’re probably going to have turmeric because they haven’t gone all the way down to refining to the point of curcumin. Very, very few are using naringin. Great. You got turmeric, but are you down to the curcumin level?
Great. You’re down to the curcumin level, but have you brought in naringin to increase the passive absorption of the curcumin molecule? So here’s a little bit more intense look at the epithelial cells. We see the tight junctions represented in blue and in red that actually hold these cells together so that we don’t have the opening between the epithelial cells.
Or bad stuff to get into the body or things that we want to have in the body going back into the digestive tract, for example, causes scours or diarrhea. So we’ve got our our proteins here that constitute the tight junctions to hold everything together. What we got to do is get curcumin into the epithelial cells to help strengthen the protein chains that constitute the tight junctions to hold everything together.
Now, here’s where we get into some interesting research. Again, we talk about things that are, are very intense. This is in vitro work and they use these Caco-2 cells. What is that? That stands for carcinoma cancer colon cells. These are cells that are grown in the lab specifically to look at intestinal permeability.
These Caco-2 cells are used in pharmacological studies to look at the ability of pharmaceuticals to be absorbed into the body and what is the ability of the body to secrete these pharmaceuticals back into the digestive tract. And if we look at the ability to absorb and the ability for the pharmaceutical or whatever molecule to go back into the digestive tract, we start to understand something about how they are absorbed.
So the Caco-2 cells are commonly used in pharmaceutical type studies. So very well accepted by the pharmaceutical community and accepted by researchers who study what’s happening at the small intestine level. Kind of new to us here on the animal nutrition side, but we’re using the Caco-2 cells as an experimental intestinal epithelial barrier to see what happens.
So here inside the circle, we have labeled apical. That is representing the area where the small intestine contents would be. Curcumin can be presented in both the apical cell side and in the basolateral side. The basolateral side of the epithelial cells represents the body. Then you have in the middle, the epithelial barrier here in the caco two cells.
So I’m going to show you the results of two experiments. In experiment number one, curcumin is put in the apical side. All right? And we’re going to look at what is the ability curcumin to enter the epithelial cells. Because we have to have curcumin getting into the epithelial cells to strengthen the tight junction proteins.
And then we’re going to look at an experiment where we put the curcumin basal lateral like the curcumin is in the body, but what is the permeability of the epithelial cells or curcumin to get back into the digestive tract? And if that is high, then we’ve got probably passive immunity. So, we’re going to look at two different studies. And the way that the researchers presented it was they put them together on the same graph and that’s how I’m going to present it.
So, having said all that, here we got our curcumin molecule. That’s what’s going to enter the epithelial cells by a passive process, passive absorption. And then also has the opportunity to go back into the body. So we’re talking about relative total curcumin concentration in the apical, which is going to be in the digester tract. Let’s think of it that way.
And then we also have basal lateral represented here on the right side. That would be curcumin concentration in the body. Think of it that way. And then intestinal cells, that’s the curcumin that gets into the actual epithelial cells. So, I said we’re looking at two different experiments.
The first experiment we’re gonna look at is over here, represented on the, the two left columns. And that is where curcumin is put on the basolateral side, okay? So we’re like putting curcumin over here on this side of the epithelial cells that represents the body. The gray column represents curcumin by itself.
The green column represents when curcumin and naringin together are put basolateral, so at this point, don’t pay attention to the basolateral here. But we’re just putting the curcumin and naringin inside the body, and we’re looking at what is the ability of curcumin to passively go into the epithelial cells and then passively go into, shall we say, the intestinal contents.
Look here. When you have curcumin and naringin together, the relative curcumin concentration is greatly increased in, shall we say, the intestinal contents. So that indicates that it’s a passive process for curcumin to go from the cells back into the body, and we have the increase here. So, naringin helps curcumin to be both absorbed and go back into the body. Passive process.
Let’s go over here to the right side.This is basal lateral. So in this part of the experiment, the curcumin is put into the apical side, the intestinal side, and now we’re evaluating the ability of the curcumin to enter the epithelial cells, the intestinal cells, and go all the way to being in the body.
The basal lateral. So what these two columns here on the right say that when you have curcumin and naringin together, you have more of the curcumin going all the way into the body because the green column is higher than the gray column, where it’s just curcumin by itself. So that part of the experiment says putting naringin and curcumin together, you increase the ability of curcumin to get into the epithelial cell passively, and go all the way into the body. Okay? That’s important.
But what we’re really wanting to do is get curcumin into the intestinal cells. So the two columns here in the middle, and this is based upon relative curcumin concentration. So we’re taking the results of both the experiment on the left, and the experiment on the right, put them together, and it says that when you have curcumin and naringin together, we get more curcumin into the intestinal cells.
Scott Zehr
I mean, it, pretty much doubles the bioavailability right across the board. Maybe even a little more than doubles.
Dr. Larry Roth
You bet. Yep. So, passive absorption, you gotta have naringin for curcumin to be absorbed. Otherwise, we don’t get it into the cells. And Scott, let’s make this study available for everybody to look at, because it is kind of complicated, and the researchers in the article do a better job of explaining all of this.
But they make the point that if you’re administering curcumin orally, like if you were a human taking a curcumin tablet, or you were feeding curcumin to an animal, a dairy cow, it’s not going to get absorbed. It’s very poorly absorbed. But what this study says is if you have naringin combined with the curcumin, you greatly increase the curcumin concentration in the intestinal cells.
Scott Zehr
You know, Larry…
Dr. Larry Roth
You just increase the ability of curcumin to move back and forth.
Scott Zehr
You know, you mentioned that you might find other stuff in the marketplace that’s using curcumin, right? And it’s on the label. It’s there. They might be talking about it. And just as an educational, I guess piece of this conversation if you’re listening to this, don’t be afraid to challenge and say, Hey, what’s the real deal here?
Is it, you know, there’s a term that gets used a lot in the feed additive world called window dressing. And unfortunately, when you look at this study, yeah, if we were putting curcumin in DTX, but not naringin, I would say that’s called window dressing.
Dr. Larry Roth
Exactly. You’re not getting the true benefits of curcumin.
Scott Zehr
So Larry, you know, that’s a great point on the curcumin and naringin conversation, and to me, this is really exciting stuff. It really demonstrates, I think, integrity on our part that we’re not going to just throw some stuff in there for a soundbite or whatever, like we’re going to actually make this work.
But this is only about half of the story so far, right? Yep. So we’re going to dive into the carnosic acid side of things. And just as a reminder we will make this presentation available to you. There will be a link in our show notes and you can always email [email protected] for some one on one consultation. Larry, tell us about carnosic acid.
Dr. Larry Roth
All right. Excellent. So carnosic acid. Fat soluble antioxidant important for protecting liver and other tissues. And here we have the carnosic acid molecule. So protect the liver so that we get detoxification of any mycotoxins that might get through. Or also protect the liver so that we can have proper nutrient metabolism.
So a very interesting study that came from South Dakota State University and let me just take a moment here to set up the study. The carnosic acid was IVed into transition dairy cows. From day one to day three of calving after calving. So it’s important day one to day three, because I’m going to show you some research that goes out three weeks.
So, why did they IV carnosic acid? They wanted to know exactly how much carnosic acid was going into the cow. Now, Carnosic acid is absorbed so we can feed it to the cow, but they were wanting to specifically know how much Carnosic was going into the animal. So they had daily intravenous infusion and you can see the rate for Carnosic acid 0.3 milligrams per kilogram. What does that mean for a 1,500 pound cow?
That would be about 0.2 gram. We are IVing for just three days. Scott, here some dramatic results. This is energy corrected milk. They saw improvements in milk production, but I’m wanting to show you energy corrected milk. A treatment difference of 0.08 P value. Remember, that was only eight cows each way.
And look at this week one, week two, week three. Remember on the previous slide, I said the carnosic acid was only administered the first three days. So this is after carnosic acid was stopped after it was stopped after three weeks after it was stopped. So this is important.
Scott Zehr
This is incredible.
Dr. Larry Roth
Early protection of the liver. There’s lasting impacts. Now, from an immune standpoint, they measured haptoglobin at different days. But, during the administration of carnosic acid, haptoglobin was reduced, which means inflammation was reduced. So what we’re talking about here is carnosic acid providing antioxidant support the first three days after calving having long term benefits from protecting the liver.
And I’m going to suggest there may be some benefits to carnosic acid for protecting other tissues as well, and if we do that, we have fewer of the free radicals or reactive oxidative species attacking other cells and attacking the liver.
But the critical importance of the first three days, dramatic. So here’s energy corrected milk. A end benefit, but other immune markers were measured that showed that during carnosic acid administration, inflammation was reduced.
So Scott, again, this article is going to be available for viewers to get into cause again, there’s some really neat stuff. But I wanted to give kind of a high level view of the curcumin and the naringin, why it’s important to supplement them together and the importance of carnosic acid.
Scott Zehr
Larry on that slide here, I mean, we’re talking week one, right? So 39, let’s call it 39 kilograms of milk versus 46 kilograms of milk?
Dr. Larry Roth
Yeah.
Scott Zehr
And if you do the math on that, that’s 15 pounds of milk. That’s a big difference, you know, at that week one. And then you look at, you know, what, 46 to 56, 57. I mean, that’s, that’s a lot of milk.
Dr. Larry Roth
It shows the importance of antioxidant support to the liver during the challenging three days after calving.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Larry Roth
Now, just think, if they had been able to provide Carnosic Pre fresh for their antioxidant support, or if they had done it even after those critical three days. So, so Scott, what we’ve looked at here, synergistic technologies. You got the Lactoform to protect the intestinal epithelial tissues. That’s good.
Now, you got Curcumin and naringin working together to defend the tight junctions. Curcumin supports the tight junction proteins, naringin improves the passive absorption of the curcumin, and then carnosic acid for antioxidant protection of the liver and other cells.
You got four components working together here. Wow, I’m excited about this, Scott. It’s all about staying on the cutting edge of what we can do to defend and protect the animal, defend and protect digestive tract integrity, defend and protect liver health.
Scott Zehr
I come back to, if you go to any of the nutrition conferences over the last three years, the amount of conversations from folks like Lance Baumgard, right? Talking about inflammation. Larry, it’s practically a buzzword. We’ve talked about it so much. And it should be, right? We know a lot more now about, you know, kind of bad inflammation and what it’s doing to our animals.
And mycotoxin surely plays a part in that and causing inflammation, systemic inflammation that’s robbing our cows of, of health and reproductive success and production. You know, hats off to you and the rest of the team that was able to put this together because this is, in my mind, the next frontier of where these nutrition industry conversations are headed over the next number of years, doing the battle with inflammation. And this is a big part of that, and if you don’t have liver health to go along with it, it’s just a such a nutrient drain.
Dr. Larry Roth
Yeah, Scott, you’re talking about the different nutrition conference, the different research conferences, people are talking about leaky gut, digestive tract integrity, people are talking about liver health. We’re able to help there.
So what can we do at Agrarian Solutions to stay on the cutting edge of technologies coming along to defend and protect the animal, and then put all of them together so that you get the synergistic benefit? Not doing just one thing, but putting all of them together.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, I, think it’s incredible. Larry, if there was, as you like to call it, the back of the napkin takeaway for folks to just kind of think about today, what would that be?
Dr. Larry Roth
Digestive tract integrity is extremely important and with DTX, you’ve now got digestive tract integrity support, epithelial cells, tight junctions. You’ve also got antioxidant support for the liver. Defend and protect the digestive tract. Defend and protect the liver.
Scott Zehr
Wow, I can’t say it enough, I think this is a step in the right direction. I mean, you know, if you hear people out in the industry talking about essential oils, talking about plant extracts, honestly, the industry has moved beyond that. This is kind of the next frontier of looking at plant extracts, if you would, and diving into the molecular level.
And as Larry said, isolating those plant actives to be able to do what they’re supposed to do without all the fluff, you know? And so, give you guys a lot of credit. And thank you, Larry, for coming on today to give us a dive into the research behind the live box and the decision to, you know, keep making the best better.
Dr. Larry Roth
All right. Thank you, Scott. Appreciate the opportunity.
Scott Zehr
Once again, everybody, thank you for tuning in to Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. And you will find that presentation and the research articles in our show notes. Again, you can email us [email protected] and we can go over them with you, send them to you. We can set up a time to go over them with you individually if we need to and, bring everybody on board with what we’re trying to accomplish with DTX and the LivOx enhancement. So thank you. And we’ll be talking to everybody next week.
