<< BTW, I do believe there is some research evidence that exercise stress
will affect GI microflora, as will other forms of stress, etc, although
I don't remember if this in response to changes in pH, motility,
temperature or what. More hmmm. Anyway, that's the primary reason why
I like feeding probiotics to help the horse recover after a ride. I
think it was work Glade did at Northwestern some time back, but I may be
mistaken.
Thanks for the discussion, Phil.
Susan Evans >>
Susan, wasn't Glade's work on branched chain amino acids?
Where we see exercise-induced negative effects on gut flora is in the case of
high body temps. When we do multiple short sprints, we can quickly build high
core temps. In these cases, we have to bring in probiotics in order to
prevent a horse that is "knocked out" for a week--off feed, loose bowels,
etc.
Another gut flora situation can occur with increases in rich rations--again,
probiotics come in very handy here. In our barn we feed Accel from Vita-Flex
to all the horses every day. Never have a colic, and we're feeding some
potent nutrition.
Finally, and I don't know much about this, but it seems that you can knock
out good bugs with exercise and then be faced with a population of bad bugs
doing damage.
ti