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RE: [RC] where is selenium high/low? - heidiI think 10 mg a day is a good starting point, but you really don't know the optimum levels for an individual horse until/unless you run selenium assays to get it dialed into a good level. The horse I mentioned in an earlier post that went from multiple non-completions in 25s and 50s prior to supplementation, to good finishes in multiple 100s, including Tevis and I think either BH100 or Ft Howe100. The first 60 days, that horse got 50 mg of selenium yeast a day, which many who consider a 'toxic' dose, but was what was needed for this individual to get whole blood levels up over 200. Heidi likes injectable Se, I prefer sticking to oral if at all possible, being a big chicken at heart, and this horse responded well to oral alone, if more slowly than injectable would have taken. There were some other specific details that also made injectable a less-than-ideal choice, but that's irrelevant to this thread. Later the daily dose went down to 30 mg a day during the riding season, and around 15-20 mg a day during the off season, and the horse continued to do great until retirement. This brings up a really good point. We ran into a lot of horses in central Oregon with levels really "bottomed out" that absolutely WOULD NOT increase their levels even being fed fairly high levels of supplemental selenium. The selenium yeast was not available then, so the injectable was really the only method we had to get the selenium actually into the blood stream. Once we GOT these horses to an acceptable whole blood level, they seemed to MAINTAIN just fine on oral products. I suspect that this is the same thing that Susan is seeing, but she is using a more bioavailable oral product that can't be so easily just shunted on down the GI tract and into the manure pile. Even so, I gather that she is having to hammer these horses pretty hard to get the levels up to par in the first place. I have no scientific proof of this hypothesis, but I always believed (given the known role of selenium as a cofactor in enzyme functions in cell membranes) that the selenium-deficient cells of the lining of the GI tract were incapable of taking up the very selenium that they needed, but once they had some on board, they worked just fine at getting it out of the gut. Heidi =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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