Looking to add a little bit more fat to my mare’s diet as we come in to winter to help keep her condition up. She gets 1 cup of fresh ground flax daily for her Omega 3s and I was looking at adding Peanut oil as it is easy for me to get and doesn’t have a horrible 3/6 ratio. The table on the website in the link below is what I was using to compare all of the oils. Has anyone fed it? I have found it on KER’s website saying that it is safe, but not much more about it.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/optimize-omega-6-omega-3-ratio#section4
Forgot to include link…
What a great chart, thank you for posting it. Am I reading it right that peanut oil is (<) 1-33 for the 3/6 ratio?
Based on that chart (@ohmyheck - I read it the same way you did) with a 1:33 ratio for omega 3/6, I wouldn’t use it.
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Are you concerned about Omega 3:6 ratio? Canola has the best profile of “regular” oils. Peanut oil was fairly popular to feed years ago, and plenty of horses did fine on it. You certainly CAN feed it, but soy is usually cheaper, and canola is better on the 3:6 front.
If you go with peanut, do make sure it doesn’t have additives. You often find it with an anti foaming agent (for frying use.)
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Why not just feed a fat supplement? The 3-6 ratio might be better, or not affected at all?
Oil IS a fat supplement. It’s 100% fat.
I Know,( i’ve fed it in the past) but didn’t know if commercial fat supplements had a better 3:6 ratio??
Not with 100% fat. Dry fat supplements are prilled oil (generally palm or soy) and have the same O3:6 ratio as the liquid oils they come from. You can use flax seed, which has a nice O3:6 profile, but is only 40% fat, so you need to feed a whole lot to hit the same level of supplementation as, say, a half cup oil.
Other packaged dry fat supplements have the same problem–relatively low fat %, or the % has been raised by prilled soy or palm oil. Omega 3 is generally $$ and harder to stabilize than omega 6 (huh, I wonder why it’s more stable, never really thought about that before) so you’re going to have a hard time finding a high omega 3 supplement that’s cost effective and storable in the barn. You could use flax oil or fish oil, but those are both cha-ching and need fridge storage.
Oil is definitely the biggest bang for your buck and best bang for your volume when adding fat to the diet, as long as you’re sticking with the “standard” grocery store oils, like soy or canola or, like the question here, peanut. It gets expensive fast, though, of you’re going to insist on more O3 than O6, regardless of the format.
Thanks Simkie, That’s why I’m feeding it in conjunction with fresh ground flax. I grind that at each feeding and just wanted to bump some calories with no more than a half cup a day of oil. She gets a half cup of flax (measured before grinding) twice a day. Would the omega 3s in that be enough to offset the peanut oil or should I look more at Canola or Olive? I can get these in bulk quantities at restaurant supply stores and have a climate controlled feed room so my cost is greatly reduced.
Does anyone here feed rice bran oil? The omega 3:6 ratio isn’t ideal, but it has an antioxdiant called gamma oryzanol that is supposed to make your horse shiny.
It seems to hard to find hard evidence on the benefits of the different oils–a lot of the stuff online is published by the feed companies, or anecdotal.
Unless peanut is significantly less $$$ than canola (and price is a concern) I’d go with canola. There’s really no benefit to peanut otherwise. Definitely don’t spend the money for olive.
But there also aren’t any studies (that I’m aware of) that have looked at what happens to the horse when you add omega 6. It’s not like we know that, say, once you add “x” amount of omega 6, or your omega 3:6 ratio exceeds “x”, that lameness issues are amplified or recovery is more difficult. It’s easy to get wrapped up in vilifying omega 6, but we really have no idea what “too much” is or what “too much” does to the horse. If you have a chronic issue and you’re chasing every possible source of inflammation, maybe it should be important, or if you’re chasing every tiny incremental gain in performance possible. But IMO, for most of us…the impact is probably small and probably mostly unimportant. So make your feed choices based on what’s convenient and cost conscious.
So given all that, I feed soy oil because it’s available and inexpensive 
If I had a source for canola that was comparable in price and availability, I’d feed that, but it’s just not worth going that far out of the way.
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That’s kind of what I had gathered through my research, and why I was posting here to see if anyone had a secret that google didn’t know about. My mare has metabolic and joint issues so I’m not going to add any unnecessary inflammatory substances unless the benefits far outweigh the risk to her.
