Ridecamp: Re: [RC] Rice Bran questions again? (Long response--feeds class is in session!-part 1)

>contributing oil as well..  Adding more corn oil may push >you beyond a
safe level--I'd have to see how the fat >percentage of the total diet worked
out to say for sure.

Your ruminant nutrition background is showing, Lisa.  You'd be okay from
that standpoint for horses, though of course, it'd be way too much for
ruminants (for everybody else, ruminants like cows and sheep can't tolerate
more than about 5% fat in the diet due to the differences in the arrangement
of the digestive tract).  You can technically add up to around 30% fat to
the equine ration, although more than around 10% becomes a management
problem, rather than a nutrient or fiber digestibility issue.

>I do notice they point out natural source Vit. E and that it's better
utilized than synthetic. Unless I've missed something somewhere, that's a
sneaky tactic (I've seen it used by a former employer, and I didn't buy it
there, either)...activity. <snip> In other words, bragging about "natural
source" is to me a marketing ploy, but I'm a little biased when it comes to
marketing tricks.

You and me both.  I worked in advertising before I went back to school and
having been one of the people that wrote the marketing pitches, I can see
them coming a mile off now.  Anyway, I agree with you about the synthetic vs
natural sources for vitamin E.  There's also some noise about the natural
vitamin E in rice bran being more potent, but nobody's come up with real
data so far.  I asked for some once and got faxed 14 pages of pretty
pictures of what a rice kernal looks like and a lot of kindergarten
explanations that boiled down to Vitamin E and You, but no actual data.

It's worth mentioning though that natural-vs-synthetic for vitamin E is one
thing, but something else for vitamin A.  There is some (real) data that you
can feed synthetic vitamin A to broodmares and still get a vitamin A
deficiency.  The nice thing, though, is that green grass is just full of
"natural" vitamin A precursors, so doesn't have to be provided through
anything fancy-shmancy.

>it is an organic compound that can bind phosphorus and >zinc.  Nonruminants
can't break that bond because they >don't secrete the enzyme phytase.  It is
a bacterial >enzyme.  Horses, of course, do have hindgut >fermentation (bugs
in the cecum), so they can deal with >it to some extent, but I suspect that
the amount of >phytate-bound mineral released and absorbed is less >than
that in ruminants because this takes place after the >feed leaves

I'd thought about that, too.  KER says the phosphorus in rice bran is fairly
available, much more so than the P in wheat bran.  Haven't seen data, but
willing to take their word for it (alot of other places, I'm not).
Susan G



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