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Re: feeding dry beet pulp?



>Just a little personal experiment with beetpulp.  I wanted o >know if beetpulp would help hold sand suspended in water, >thinking that if it did so in a glass jar it might work the >same way in the horse.  I put a pint of water in a clear >glass jar, added about 1/2 cup of dry beetpulp, then about >2 tablespoons of sand.  I shook the jar well.  Within
>moments, all of the sand had settled to the bottom of the >jar.  I repeated the shaking of the jar & the sand sank >every time.     Perhaps beetpulp does not move the sand >out of the horse.  I'll try the same thing with bran and with >psillium
 
 
 
No, beet pulp does not "hold" sand.  But in the hindgut, neither does psyllium and bran doesn't do a thing.  When you espouse the theory that psyllium somehow surrounds a particle of sand and thus floats it out of the hindgut, you're assigning some sort of intelligence to the psyllium so that it somehow knows the difference between a particle of sand and a particle of anything else.  Doesn't happen.  Same with beet pulp---much as I love beet pulp, I just can't manage to assign it an IQ.
 
As I explained in another post, what moves sand from the hindgut is *peristalsis*, and what triggers that is either a) filling the stomach so the stretch receptor triggers release of the hormone motilin, and/or b) exercise.  You can fill the stomach with pretty much anything, but feeds that swell a bit after ingestion and thereby stretch the stomach a bit more than other feeds are going to produce a better motilin release.  There's nothing magical about psyllium or beet pulp in the way that they move sand---for that matter, they don't ever get into the same neighborhood as the sand, since both are very well fermented, digested and absorbed in the small intestine and cecum, so virtually none will ever see the hindgut where the sand is.  Also, people talk about how they fed such and such and lo and behold, the horse pooped and moved out a ton of sand.  Great.  But it takes 24-48 hours for that psyllium or beet pulp to make it from the stomach to the hindgut---so it's not psyllium/beet pulp IN the hindgut that makes a difference---it's the stretching of the stomach that triggers the motilin release that moves the hindgut that moves the sand.
 
Want to increase the benefit of it---go out and ride your horse at an easy trot for a long time.  The gut never moves better than at about 20% VO2max.
 
Forget about bran doing ANYTHING for gut motility, at least any more so than any other feed occupying the same volume of space.  It's a common mistake that because bran does wonders for the HUMAN digestive system, it must do the same thing for horses.  It doesn't.  Humans don't have a functional cecum, but horses' cecums work just fine and all that bran will never get within shouting distance of the colon where the sand is.
 
Hope this clears it up.
 
Susan G


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