[Fwd: RC: Re: Reply to Sarah's post]

[wsabg@t-online.de (Wolfgang Schwingenheuer)]

Frank Mechelhoff schrieb:

> Hey Heather,
> nice to find some more Europeans here in RC ;-)
>
> Most of us (me2) use fat to a limited extend, as an additional source of energy,
> and to reduce one of the biggest problem occurring on high-grain-diets: too much
> overall protein.  I use sunflower-oil, others use corn-oil, or even animal-fat.
> It's not my conviction it does any good for itself, but I see the advantage that
> 0,3 litre oil has the energy as the 6-fold volume of  oats - and I feed some
> oats too.
> In the natural ration of the horse fat occurs only in a very limited form - if
> any! Fat-rich types of grain comsists at max. 20% fat. Most horses don't even
> like fat to eat, and some really hate it  - there will be a reason for it...
> The main reason against feeding fat seems to be that big amounts of fat in the
> bowel reduces digestion of fibre, the natural energy source of the horse, and
> therefore aggrevate the horses overall body condition (usually the opposite what
> shall be reached). Another important one, in the athlete, is that fats acts as
> pro-oxidants, and will produce free radicals that destroy cells and inhibit
> healing, which must be balanced with feeding more Vit.E and Selenium. You can
> easily do too much of a good thing!
>
> I well know that "high-fat-diets" were announced for more than one decade for
> endurance and other high performance horses. Time enough to find out. I
> personally know absolute NO rider who uses, or had used fat as a primary energy
> source with success. I would like to hear if ANY Ridecamper had feed a
> "high-fat-diet" (say, more than 1 litre ~ 2 pds per day) over some periods of
> time with success - that means, was happy with overall condition and performance
> of the horse. I doubt. If such person exists, I would be really interested to
> know the type and amounts of fat as well as the amount of other nutrients, how
> the basic feeding is and what time it takes get the horse used to this diet.
> Maybe then I'll give one more try. At the moment, "high-fat" seems to be a
> dead-horse to me. A very dead one.
>
> regards
> Frank Mechelhoff
> Schmitten, Germany
> - & the Taunus mountain ponies (Ligeira and Natajy) -
>
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Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net.    
Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/RideCamp   
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=