Re: Sources of Foods

[K S Swigart <katswig@deltanet.com>]

On Thu, 22 Jan 1998, HELFTER 77 wrote:

> Sources of Foods
> 
> For those who did not read past "sugar is bad for horses" I am re-posting the
> remains of that paragraph and the following paragraph for reiteration.
> Please keep in mind that poor quality grains are hidden in sweet feeds. This
> is a fact. The feed industry has a bad habit of using our animals as garbage
> disposals. Sweet and pelleted feeds are great for covering up that garbage.

I was quite careful in my post to state that what I was objecting to was
the statement about sugar being bad for horses and that I was "refusing to
enter the fray" about whether sweet feeds were good horse feed because of
their molasses content.

There may be many reasons for not feeding molasses to horses but "sugar is
bad for horses" is not one of them.

The point I was trying to make is that the actual statement "sugar is bad
for horses" and the implication that "molasses contains alot of sugar"
(and therefore is bad for horses) are misleading.

Sugar is not bad for horses, it is a staple of life and absolutely
essential for horses with heavy energy demands.

Molasses does not contain huge quantities of sugar...the apples, carrots,
and corn that are staples of a many a horse's diet may easily contain
quite a bit more (according to the nutritional analysis on my bag of
carrots, one medium carrot contains about 8.5% sugar).

And I was concerned that someone describing herself as  "President of
Advanced Biological Concepts" would be taken seriously about the "sugar is
bad for horses" thing and people would therefore be afraid to feed their
horses anything with sugar in it.

The simple biological concept (I learned it in Biology 1 at UCLA) is that
sugar is not bad it is, in fact, the only thing that the body uses for
fuel.

How the body gets that fuel is a different question entirely (which I also
stated in my previous post). Just because the body needs sugar doesn't
mean that the body needs to be fed sugar.  The body is capable of
synthesizing sugar.  How best to provide our horses with sugar is an
extremely complex problem...and it doesn't do any (or at least not much)
good to look at what horses "naturally" eat to keep themselves going,
since their natural energy demands are significantly less than those we
put on our horses at and endurance ride.

kat
Orange County, Calif.