12/10/2024
Your horse needs more fat, fiber and protein. Not sugars and starches, aka grains and molasses. (including wheat and wheat middlings)
Did you know the Equine digestive system is extremely efficient at burning fats? In fact, in the absence of grains or other forms of these concentrated sugars, their preferred fuel source is fats and fibers, not sugars or starches.
This is because horses are uniquely adapted at converting them to VFAs or Volatile Fatty Acids. So they don't actually need many sugars or starches at all.
A horse stores it's glucose in the form of glycogen and glucagon in the muscles and liver. These are meant to be used as a last resort, not the first.
Consider this: when stored glucose is depleted it takes a horse up to 3 days to restore it.
If you feed sugars and starches, insulin spikes and blocks them from burning anything else until all the unnecessary excess glucose the sugars and starches caused are all used up.
This doesn't happen because it's the preferred fuel source, it happens because their bodies don't do well with excess glucose so they try to eliminate it as fast as possible.
When sugars and starches are the fuel source, lactic acid is the biproduct. When fats or fibers are the fuel source, their is no lactic acid biproduct.
Do you want your horse to have a better body condition, more efficient metabolism and increased stamina and strength?
Cut the grains, go to forage only and consider adding something like Victory as a great overall solution not only to this problem, but a whole host of other ones as well.
Want more info? See the link in the comments below.
