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Fat/Sluggishness



k s swigart katswig@earthlink.net
Yes, it has been anecdotally observed by many people (myself inluded) that feeding fat has
a tendency to make the horse sluggish.  As a result of this
observation of mine, I looked for other sources of calories for
my horse.

I have, since then, read an article that actually described a
clinical study that discovered that feeding fat measurably
slowed down the neurological response time in horses (i.e. the
nerves don't fire as quickly).  This was not a case of fat horses
had slower firing nerves, but rather the horses that had been
fed fat had slower firing nerves.  There wasn't anything in the
article that speculated as to why this might be the case, and
I don't know if the experiment was ever repeated.  And I don't
recall what percentage of the "fat fed" horses' diets were indeed.
I can probably hunt down the article somewhere (but it has probably
sunk to the bottom of some endless stack of papers by now).

The diet of my endurance horses in training consists of about .5% to 1.5% fat (maybe twice that on race days) which I use, not so much for its energy content (a little), but more for the fact that
it also has been shown to "slow the uptake" a little bit of
carbohydrates from the gut and so can be used to even out blood
sugar levels during the course of the event.

kat
Orange County, Calif.

p.s.  Some people may want to use fat for the very reason that it
slows down the neurological response of the horse, as it could
very well have the function of slowing down a "super-reactive" horse.


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