“Brain food” for top performing horses

Quiz: If someone put salt in your coffee what would you do?

• 1.Add loads of sugar
• 2.Add more salt and Bovril and turn it into a savoury drink
• 3.Throw it away and start again without salt

It’s a no brainer isn’t it? It can be very difficult to overcome a fundamental flaw in your horse’s diet by adding more stuff. Yet that is exactly what thousands of riders do every day without realising it. They feed diets with brain impairing chemicals in them and then pile in more brain impairing chemicals (marketed as calmers) and expect the world to be all honey and roses. The EquiFeast approach is different from many other feed companies.

So what are these brain impairing chemicals in our horse feeds?

Magnesium

Seems innocuous enough doesn’t it? In days gone by it made sense to add magnesium to magnesium deficient, cereal based feeds. Few people feed their horses like that anymore and high fibre/forage diets have plenty of magnesium in them¹.

Oral magnesium is a sedative^{3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}. The biochemists tell us how it sedates and the equine scientists have recently shown a comparable effect to the veterinary drug Acepromazine (Sedalin)^4,5.

Magnesium is poorly regulated in the body^7,8. The pro-magnesium lobby tells you the more you feed the more is excreted in urine and faeces. That is true but it only explains a proportion of the extra magnesium. In the experimental diets of Hintz & Schryver^{9, 10} the more they fed the more was retained. And the retained potion is bigger than either of the excreted ones. Here is the graph from their 1972 paper. Pretty clear isn’t it?

Academics have looked at adding magnesium with no behavioural benefits reported⁵. Facebook threads report some horses getting on well with magnesium and others the reverse.

EquiFeast have been monitoring customer feedback of magnesium’s effect on horses since 2011. Obviously this is anecdotal but these are our conclusions:

• 1.Horses don’t seem to overdose on the naturally occurring magnesium in grass and hay (mostly bound to the chlorophyll molecule). Has millions of years of evolution sorted this out? Hintz& Schryver speculated on this but never tested it experimentally¹⁰.
• 2.Artificial sources of magnesium used in feeds and supplements seem to elevate blood magnesium levels and cause problems for the brain. Hintz & Schryver demonstrated this^9,19.

When we start our client’s horses on “no artificial magnesium diets” 97% stick with that¹¹.

Sugars and starches

The vast majority of the horses that are referred to us are already on modern high fibre diets though there can be a lot of starch and sugar in some pasture and hay and some conditioning feeds.

We try to get sugars and starches down in diets – more because of the negative impacts on ulcers, colic and laminitis than for the behavioural issues. There is evidence that, except for the hardest working horses, who may need some carbohydrates for glycogen replenishment after very hard work, modern high fibre, high oil diets are very capable of producing top quality performances¹².

GABA Agonists and other herbal ingredients

Sorry that this sounds rather technical but if I list a bunch of them for you, you will probably find most of them quite familiar: chamomile, devil’s claw, eugenol (active ingredient in aniseed, fennel and licorice), hops, kava kava, lavender, passionflower, rauwolfia, skullcap and valerian.

But you will probably be very surprised when I tell you that the GABA agonist you have probably heard of most is Diazepam (Valium). So there are a number of herbal feed and supplement products on the market in the UK and Europe that hit the same receptor in the brain as Valium.

In America the USEF has every one of those listed above on its prohibited lists¹³! Some are already on the FEI prohibited substances list as well. Evidence that for some horses they work perhaps?

Our view is that, though some horses respond well to these herbal drugs, our approach is to improve brain function rather than dampen it down so we try to eliminate them from diets.

Why is brain function so important?

We have all read the idea that, because they are prey animals, horses should be naturally nervous and spooky. I don’t feel comfortable with that argument. To me horses should be good at assessing the risks in their environment. I think a horse that can’t tell the difference between a sparrow and a lion or that spooks at the whiteboards is more likely to run into trouble than to keep safe. So our approach to having a calm horse is not to dampen down the spook response - as magnesium does⁴ - but to do our very best to get the brain working as well as possible.

Once that is achieved our horses can realise that there are very few apex predators in the UK. And then they learn to concentrate on their rider and their work without fear or tension. Every rider’s dream.

Nutrients that are required for good brain function

Eliminating “Brain Impairing Nutrients” is the first part of our “Whole Diet Approach to Horse Behaviour and Function”. For a lucky few that is all that needs to be done. But there are nutrients that are either in short supply in modern diets or that get used up rapidly during stress or excitement that seem to benefit many horses when used correctly. But that is a topic for another article or ring us for a chat about your horse.

Our CORE&MORE feed range and diet review has been designed to offer this approach to horse owners in the UK. If you are comfortable with magnesium or herbs then please stick with them. We are offering an alternative for the rest of you to try.

For a referenced version of this article and some further explanations please follow this link: https://equifeast-shop.com/blog/brain-food-for-top...

For more information ring 01453 836974 or contact Malcolm Green malcolm@EquiFeast.com or Georgina Evison georgina@EquiFeast.com or visit our website: https://equifeast-shop.com/magnesium-our-controversial-but-science-supported-view/

References and further explanations

¹ Comparing the magnesium levels in forages from the NRC with their recommended levels of dietary magnesium shows that the only forage that won’t meet the horse’s needs are Corn cobs. Most forages would provide 2-3 times the RDI if they were fed as 100% of the diet. During spring and autumn rapidly growing, rich, fertilised pasture MAY lead to short term magnesium deficiencies as Mg is lost in the urine as a result of the horses efforts to excrete excess potassium².

² dairy.ahdb.org.uk/news/technical articles/march-2015/magnesium-at-grass/#Vn_OYvmLTtQ

³ The FEI Prohibited Substances Database has injectable magnesium on its Controlled Medication list AS A SEDATIVE and that begs the question “Can ingested magnesium have the same effect as an injection?” Nobody has done that experiment but Jess Dodds³ and Wendy Pearson⁴ have shown that oral magnesium has the same effect on horses as the veterinary sedative Acepromazine (Sedalin).

⁴ Magnesium aspartate supplementation and reaction speed response in horses: Abstracts/ Journal of Equine Veterinary Science 35 (2015) 401-402.

⁵ Pearson et al. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science 51 (2017) 86-91

⁶ Wilkins and Wilkins. The role of calcium and comparable cations in animal behaviour 2003; Royal Society of Chemistry

⁷ Jahnen-Dechent and Ketteler, Magnesium Basics. Clinical Kidney Journal, 2012 Feb; 5(Suppl 1): i3-i14.Oxford University Press

⁸ Magnesium Disorders in Horses. Vet Clin Equine 27 (2011) 149-163

⁹ Magnesium Metabolism in the Horse, Hintz and Schryver. Journal of Animal Science, vol 35, no 4, 1972

¹⁰ Magnesium, Calcium and Phosphorus metabolism in ponies fed varying levels of magnesium. Hintz & Schryver, Journal of Animal Science, vol 37, no 4, 1973

¹¹ Evaluation of our confidential sales figures for CORE&MORE feeds and balancers

¹² Pagan et al. Effect of non-structural carbohydrate intake on glycogen repletion following intense exercise. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science vol 35, iss5, May 2015 408-409.

¹³ https://www.usef.org/forms-pubs/2Zp2C_YKs4s/drugs-medications-guidelines. pp 4-5.