I recently heard that feeding oil can have a negative impact on vitamin and mineral absorption and due to this you shouldn’t feed oil.
I am a little skeptical and couldn’t find much to support it. Has anyone heard of this before?
What kind of oil? A plant based oil would be digested.
A petroleum based oil such as mineral oil, comes through “as-is”.
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I assumed plant based, so vegetable oil, sunflower oils, rice bran oils or even some fish oils etc.
By feeding one of the above with a mineral mix would result in the minerals not being absorbed and therefore a waste of $$
Not sure if this is a question. Are you asking if feeding a plant based oil with a supplement containing minerals will prevent absorption of the minerals? I don’t think it would.
This article actually says that feeding fats/oils can enhance the absorption of fat soluble vitamins A, D and E.
http://training.ifas.ufl.edu/Equine2…o%20Horses.pdf
The article also states that if adding a substantial amount of oil to replace a grain portion in order to increase calorie intake, one must be sure that the rest of the diet provides the needed protein, vitamins and minerals for the horse, since plant oils do not contain them. Maybe this is what you were referring to?
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I have been looking for it since I read this thread, and I WILL find it, eventually. But I did run across something maybe a month ago about how either too much oil, or maybe just a diet high enough in fat, actually does contribute to a deficiency in a certain mineral. It wasn’t some sketchy blog where I read it either, it was a pretty valid source. But, my searching is not bringing anything useful up.
The article that I cited discusses using rice bran as a fat source with a caution:
Another concern with rice bran is its inherently high phosphorus content, which is inverted in proportion to the calcium content. If a significant amount of rice bran (2 or more pounds) is added to the horse’s ration, the diet will have to be balanced with supplemental calcium to avoid metabolic bone disorders. Some companies have corrected for this imbalance by adding calcium to their rice bran supplements (be sure to read the label).
Sorry yes - it’s a question. I was told that by feeding oil, it would mean that the vitamins and minerals also being fed would be unable to be absorbed. So theoretically if I were to feed beet with a mineral mix and oil (e.g. vegetable oil), there would be no point in feeding the minerals as the oil would prevent their absorption.
I was just curious as I have never come across anything about that before - everything I have read has been about the benefits of oil in the horses diet. The best I could find on the topic was that “large” amount of oil could possibly interfere, but it wasn’t from a specific source and ‘large’ wasn’t quantified.
That’s a different issue though and can be caused by a variety of feedstuffs that are inherently imbalanced, when fed in enough quantity.
That “the diet will have to be balanced” isn’t telling the whole story though - if you’re feeding a diet with a lot of alfalfa, the rice bran is doing the balancing 
That statement should be amended to state “if you are feeding a diet that is all or mostly grass forage-based” or something like that.
What I saw was a direct inhibiting of a mineral absorption, as opposed to causing an imbalance by adding too much of a nutrient.
As a blanket statement no, that is not true.
Vitamin E requires fat to be properly absorbed, when used as the fat-soluble form. There’s a water-soluble form as well, such as Elevate W.S.
Even outside of that though, no, nutrients are not wholly prevented from being absorbed. Too many horses on higher amounts of oil prove that
A few years back I had two of my horses on 2 cups of canola oil a day. I wasn’t having great luck with weight gain (older teeth issues etc), despite 9lbs of high fat feed, free choice hay etc. I read somewhere about this potential oil/mineral issue (possibly on here) and said what the heck and took both horses off the oil. They both did better once removing the oil and continued to gain weight. Not very scientific I know but I’m never feeding oil again.
Same thing happened to me. Twice. Both TBs. I think I only had the first one on 1c/day, back when oil was THE thing to feed for “cool energy”. He didn’t do well - not poorly, just not well.
The 2nd was my TB mare shortly after getting her OT. Because, again, it was the thing to do. I had her on about 1.5 c/day, after she plateaued at 6lb of grain (and I really didn’t want to feed more than that), and she did put on weight for a short while, then plateaued again. I removed the oil and added rice bran - loss of calories, less fat - and she gained weight again. I never did really understand why, but it is what it is.
There are definitely horses who require those levels of oil/fat, the PSSM type horses, or even some whose work dictates they need something like that. Their need for that style of feeding outweighs whatever detriments come with it. But when the honest to goodness NEED isn’t there, the downside often seems to outweigh anything the owner thinks will be of value.
Before we can answer the question don’t we have to know the 5Ws of the assertion? It’s a wildly broad statement and such statements are often true in some small context part but only in that context.
Given the level of “old wives tales” in the equine world in general I’d be skeptical of this one.
G.
High fat feed plus 2 cups of oil likely resulted in fat reaching the large intestine where it would depress fiber digestibility, thus limiting energy from the forage component of your diet.
The rule of thumb to feed horses up to 2 cups of oil/day really isn’t appropriate for horses consuming high fat commercial grain mixes.
There are also confounding dietary factors that influence passage rate of digesta through the small and large intestine, which could further influence diet digestibility when feeding high fat diets.
Knic13- is 6% fat feed really considered that high fat?
No, I wouldn’t consider 6% to be high fat.
OP, is this something that you remember reading in a credible source, is it something you saw on a random blog, or is it something you heard from another person who is not a nutrition expert or vet? Basically random horse people are liable to tell you anything at all, that they thought they heard somewhere else, or extrapolated, or just plain invented.
Horses don’t naturally eat high quantities of oil, but certainly some people have success supplementing with limited amounts of oil. And the high-calorie low sugar feeds tend to have a a high oil content, though it isn’t visible as oil. The popular one around here is made from alfalfa meal and soy oil.
Mineral oils aren’t digested so they just run through. That’s why tubing with mineral oil is a treatment for impaction colic (though I understand there are now better things to tube with for that). Food oils (vegetable or animal derived) get digested in the small intestine, though I suppose if you fed so much that it was not fully digested there and it went to the hind gut, you could disrupt fermentation there. But given that people feed flax oil in order to get Vitamin E into their horses, a certain amount of oil isn’t going to prevent vitamins and minerals from being absorbed.
It’s very interesting, I was curious as I feed about a cup of oil a day to one of my more difficult to keep weight on horses.
The info came second hand - but originally did come from someone who I think is a reputable source and does have a bit to do with producing minerals etc for horses.
Ok, with the help of the aforementioned friend, there is this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12405665
which suggests that the higher in fat the diet, the more of a loss of magnesium and chloride uptake there is.
Thanks for sharing the citation. Did you happen to have access to the entire manuscript?
I read the manuscript and had a couple thoughts on interpretation.
Dietary mineral inclusion was not held constant across dietary fat levels, which may confound results.
Chloride inclusion increased with increasing fat.
Magnesium inclusion was constant across fat inclusion levels until you got to the highest level, where it was half that of the other diets (0.04 vs 0.02 % DM).
Blood serum chloride did not differ with level of fat inclusion.
Blood serum magnesium only differed between Diet 0.33 and 1.33.
You wouldn’t expect to see much if any difference in blood serum levels because they are tightly regulated.
The data that you reference…Fractional clearance of magnesium and chloride were decreased with increasing levels of dietary fat.
This is not a measure of mineral uptake. It is a measure of mineral retention and it is based on the body pool. Decreased fractional clearance of magnesium/chloride indicates more magnesium/chloride was reabsorbed by the kidney. Which appears to be a function of decreased urine output with increasing dietary fat in this particular study. In the discussion they mention this trend for other minerals but only found a significant dietary influence with mag and chloride.
All that to say…this study (while interesting!!) does not suggest that mineral absorption is altered by dietary fat inclusion.
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