Why are horse people so obsessed with supplements?

[Pony_Someday]

It’s interesting that we’re usually much more skeptical about what a supplement can do for us as humans. We pay attention to where our supplements are sourced, and we’re aware that we increase our risk of toxicity, or at best, wasting our money, the more we supplement since the industry is unregulated. Thoughts, opinions?

Full disclosure, I do feed U-Gard or SmartGut Ultra, or a fat/rice bran supplement, depending on the horse. I just see so many posts with so many different supplements being idealized as a magical panacea, and sometimes it makes me roll my eyes a bit. I get this is not every horse owner, but is this something that COTH has noticed, too?

Does this come from our own anxiety that urges us to find a way to fix the problem quickly, and most importantly, are we too often overlooking what might actually be much more effective?

[skipollo]

Because it makes people feel like they’re doing more for their horses’ care, and more=better. Very few supplements can do actual damage, and it makes owners feel better.

Some supplements are actually worth using, but some others are just expensive fairy dust. For the most part they aren’t hurting anyone, so just let people live and do what they want :lol: There are many things to get annoyed over, this ain’t one of them

[Pony_Someday]

@skipollo

Very few supplements can do actual damage, and it makes owners feel better.

Point taken. But how do you know this? If the magical fairy dust is not actually fixing the problem, but we’re led to believe that it is, does that cause potential harm?

[Bluey]

@Pony Someday

Point taken. But how do you know this? If the magical fairy dust is not actually fixing the problem, but we’re led to believe that it is, does that cause potential harm?

Our vets sell those their clients demand, but calls them “expensive urine” (well, a more basic name ).

What is not used is excreted, most of those do no harm.

Now, our 22 year old has been now for 6 years on Prascend and Thyroid-L, a supplement.
By vet’s prescription, after testing and being regularly tested and found in need of that medication and supplement.

There are legitimate uses for supplements of all kinds.
Adding them like one more treat is not really necessary, but maybe also not harmful to other than the owner’s pocket.

[GoodTimes]

I think you have to differentiate between the supplements that people are buying to balance the diet, or are prescribed by a vet for a medical condition vs the supplements that people believe with cure or fix “xyz”.

I feed a ration balancer and supplement that with copper and zinc (to offset the high iron here), I supplement vit e and selenium (diet is primarily hay and we’re in a low selenium area).

I wouldn’t waste my money on joint supplements, calming supplements, etc, etc.

[Scribbler]

Yes, in people and in horses, you need to distinguish. I am going to define supplements below as excluding actual pharmaceuticals which of course can also be given on an ongoing basis (Prascend, Regumate, NSAs, etc).

First there are vitamin mineral supplements, which provide known factors for optimal health. If a human is not eating a balanced diet they should be taking a basic complete VMS. Most horses also are not getting a balanced diet for various reasons so they too need a VMS or ration balancer. And salt.

Also there are components of basic diet like flax that can be seen as either a feed or a supplement.

Then there are medically effective
”‹supplements with research behind them. In any given case, you want your vet’s recommendation plus your own research to verify this. In this category I would put good probiotics and Yeasacc (which I’ve used successfully as needed) and the Thyroid supplement mentioned above (which I’m not personally familiar with).

”‹”‹”‹”‹A subset of this category is feed through joint supplements, which unfortunately don’t have strong research supporting their efficacy compared to either intramuscular or intra articular injections. This is one category of fairly pricey supplements that people will feed just in case it works, because there seem to be no ill effects
”‹”‹
Next down the list are vitamins and minerals fed in larger therapeutic rather than just maintenance doses, which have documented proof of efficacy. Here I would put extra copper and zinc for metabolic horses, extra vitamin E for some infectious diseases. Magnesium which can calm horses if their nervousness is due to magnesium deficiency. Etc.

Lower down the list are herbal or “natural” supplements that often have undisclosed or erratic levels of active ingredients, and can have rather extravagant claims. Very often, an inexpensive raw material (raspberry leaves, flax) is repackaged as an expensive brand name product. Here it really pays to do your homework.

So “supplement” is a very broad category. I am newly converted to taking my own VMS every day since starting it knocked out some leg cramps I was having over the summer and has made my exercise recovery time much faster. Clearly I was deficient in minerals!

So “why do people feed supplements” needs to be rephrased as “why do people feed supplement x?”

OP, do you have a specific supplement or supplement category that you are wondering about?

[eightpondfarm]

boy i sure agree with you OP! I would rather eat well and fresh than try to guess what handfuls of supplements i need to swallow every day. Same for my horses. I try to plant and/or encourage a variety of different vegetation into my pastures and let the animals (cattle/horses/sheep/llamas) all decided for themselves what they need to balance their diet.

[wildlifer]

Because marketing.

[Scribbler]

[QUOTE=eightpondfarm;n10743774]boy i sure agree with you OP! I would rather eat well and fresh than try to guess what handfuls of supplements i need to swallow every day. Same for my horses. I try to plant and/or encourage a variety of different vegetation into my pastures and let the animals (cattle/horses/sheep/llamas) all decided for themselves what they need to balance their diet. [/QUOT
”‹”‹”‹”‹
However if your soil is high in iron or low in selenium you are going to need to account for that in your nutrition planning, and just browsing may not be enough.

[Guyot]

Run blood work and supplement the diet where it is deficient. I do basic blood work once a year, Vit e test twice yearly, and amino acid test yearly as well.

Most horses I have in my care are on vit E as we are very deficient here. Most are on some type of probiotic. The super fat horses are on a basic General vitamin as even ration balancer is too many calories for them. A couple are on tri-amino which are the limiting amino acid and if they are low I don’t want to be wasting my money on expensive vit E and it not being effective.

But I’m going to stress this again! We Annually TEST our horses and adjust accordingly.

Running these test is money well spent and your doing the best for your horse as you are helping when they need it and not taxing their system giving them something they have to filter out.

[Red_Barn]

Eh. I think it’s just one more instance of consumer capitalism in the economic End Times.

The bulk of the country’s working people are broke and worried. A shrinking sliver of the professional class has enough extra money to buy luxury items like horses, though, so people looking to market and sell something with a hefty profit margin naturally target that demographic. It’s just like the explosion of over-priced beauty products and cosmetics - everybody knows that the fancy new cream (or pellet) is probably not going to do much of anything, but we do care about our looks (and our horsies) so we keep trying, just in case.

That, and the fact that boarding barns seem to be increasing cheap with hay, and owners seem increasingly ignorant of what forage is all about.

[Obsidian_Fire]

@eightpondfarm

boy i sure agree with you OP! I would rather eat well and fresh than try to guess what handfuls of supplements i need to swallow every day. Same for my horses. I try to plant and/or encourage a variety of different vegetation into my pastures and let the animals (cattle/horses/sheep/llamas) all decided for themselves what they need to balance their diet.

All well and good IF you have that luxury, which most do not.

Far too many horses kept nowadays on very limited if any, access to fresh grass let alone decent turnout.

[FjordBCRF]

I spent quite a bit of energy and time learning about the right mineral balance to make sure I am feeding my guys hooves properly. I started him on Farriers Formula and after some reading and advice, realized the ratios were not great and switched to Cal Trace. I gave the bag to someone else who does feed it and for what it’s worth, she seemed confused why I wasn’t using it anymore; I tried to give her the high level.

If that makes me obsessed, I will wear that badge loud and proud. Other than Cal Trace mixed into a small amount of alfalfa cubes and shredded beet pulp, we are just working with hay and pasture.

[lenapesadie]

@Pony Someday

It’s interesting that we’re usually much more skeptical about what a supplement can do for us as humans. We pay attention to where our supplements are sourced, and we’re aware that we increase our risk of toxicity, or at best, wasting our money, the more we supplement since the industry is unregulated. Thoughts, opinions?

Full disclosure, I do feed U-Gard or SmartGut Ultra, or a fat/rice bran supplement, depending on the horse. I just see so many posts with so many different supplements being idealized as a magical panacea, and sometimes it makes me roll my eyes a bit. I get this is not every horse owner, but is this something that COTH has noticed, too?

Does this come from our own anxiety that urges us to find a way to fix the problem quickly, and most importantly, are we too often overlooking what might actually be much more effective?

For myself, because I know that my horse’s nutritional requirements aren’t being met by the hay / pasture provided at his boarding facility. So I supplement.

We are enormously deficient in zinc, copper, selenium, calcium, magnesium and way high in iron and aluminum. So he gets mineral supplements plus vit E, biotin, and E03 oil or flax.

Additionally I supplement him with Refresh April through September so he will keep sweating and not die of a heat stroke.

Does the flake of alfalfa hay count as a supplement? His TC Senior?

I guess I am obsessed with trying to provide the best nutrition I can for my horse. Not sorry!

[Scribbler]

@Pony Someday

Point taken. But how do you know this? If the magical fairy dust is not actually fixing the problem, but we’re led to believe that it is, does that cause potential harm?

Again it really depends on how you define supplement.

Too much selenium is toxic. Too much magnesium causes diarrhea. I think feeding probiotics nonstop is probably harmless but I prefer to do a course of them and then let the horses own digestion take over again. An ineffective supplement is obviously harmless.

You are correct to note that people do fall into marketing traps and feed supplements without proven efficacy or with too little active ingredient to be effective.

However, it shows equal ignorance of horse nutrition and well being to lump everything in as “fairy dust” because things like VMS or ration balancers are indeed necessary for all horses being kept stabled and in work. See my other post.

[Equkelly]

Confirmation bias. Which is defined as “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories”. You buy a supplement that’s marketed to you because it’s supposed to help with “xyz.” That’s the theory. Then our brains tend to see “evidence” that supports that “theory.”

For example, I feed Forco and Probios after my young horse was hospitalized last spring from an unexplained colic. Since I put her on those supplements, no colic. Is it because the Forco and probios are helping whatever GI issues caused her to colic in the first place? Who knows. I’d like to think so because I’d like to think that I’m doing something that could prevent that happening. But truthfully, it could be purely coincidence that she has not coliced.

Am I going to take her off them and find out? Nope. So I’m going to go on believing they work, and believing she “needs” them.

[Scribbler]

I have used probiotics and Yeasacc to treat persistent diarrhea that was simply showing no signs of going away in its own. The general research on priobiotics in humans is good; finding a horse brand that’s effective might take some trials.

Improvements in overall nutrition take longer to show up but I can certainly point to the place on one horse’s hoof that shows when I started her on VMS.

In these cases the supplements have real observable effects.

[Bluey]

@Scribbler

I have used probiotics and Yeasacc to treat persistent diarrhea that was simply showing no signs of going away in its own. The general research on priobiotics in humans is good; finding a horse brand that’s effective might take some trials.

Improvements in overall nutrition take longer to show up but I can certainly point to the place on one horse’s hoof that shows when I started her on VMS.

In these cases the supplements have real observable effects.

Not necessarily, something else may have caused the changes, like the weather, humidity, activity, changes in any feed, hay/other feed, metabolic or other changes we can’t measure, etc.
Some times, we just can’t control everything in one environment/individual enough to be certain of cause and effect.
That is why testing requires careful protocols.

While we live by believing we are doing our best as we can find it works, it is not a given that by doing x once we had definite y results.
That is something to keep in mind, always.

[trubandloki]

This isn’t really a horse person thing. It is a person thing. There is a huge market for human supplements too. Whole stores of them even.

[quietann]

I am in the long slow process of cutting down on supplements for my mare.

Like others, I differentiate between “medicines” and supplements. For her, medicines are Equioxx, Thyro-L, Vitamin E, and some sort of magnesium supplement. Possibly omeprazole – that is a work in progress, and I worry about long term effects. (Older Morgan with diagnosed arthritis, borderline IR, very little grass available and EPM history, borderline IR & calming effect needed, ulcers diagnosed recently, respectively).

I add raspberry leaves to the above mostly because they taste good and hide the flavors of some of the other supplements – and are very inexpensive when purchased in bulk. She can’t have much grain/pellets to try to hide flavors, see borderline IR above. Also, the barn feeds hay very generously – not free choice, but more than most barns in my area.