The Science of Feeding for Performance - Holly Spooner PhD

I typically kick the episodes off by having the guests tell us who they are and what it is they do. Sure. My name is Doctor Holly Spooner and I’m the vice president of science and innovation for Unbeatable Feeds. I’ve been with Unbeatable Feeds for just about a year, but have much more experience in the feed industry. Before that was a university professor.

Across a couple of universities since finishing my PhD almost 20 years ago now. Excited to be here and talk more with you today and share more about unbeatable. Yeah, I actually found out about unbeatable probably like a little over a year ago, maybe maybe about a year ago. And I actually have a force with some autoimmune issues and was doing the like DIY alfalfa pellets and make my own fat and do all of this. And then actually found, I think I was just like at Tractor Supply.

And I was like, I saw the feed and I think I thought it was just an alfalfa pellet. And I read these kids and I was like, oh, there’s this is like an actual feed. And yeah. So that kind of introduced me to the brand and. For people who don’t know who Unbeatable Feeds are, what would you say as a brand, as a company, what they do, who they are?

Sure, Absolutely. Unbeatable Feeds is wholly owned by a group called Midwest Agri Commodities and Midwest Agri Commodities has been around for over 40 years and is essentially responsible for marketing beat by products from four of the major US sugar beet cooperatives. When we think about products who come from beets besides sugar, we’re talking about beat pulp, molasses, betaine and a few other minor Co products. Beat pulp being a big part of that. Midwest has marketed a huge amount of the beat pulp in the US for a very long time and knew that much of that beat pulp was going into livestock feeds and then more recently horse feeds.

And really started diving into the science and value that beat pulp can bring and wanted to continue to support that and grow that and market that. And so started bagging their own beat pulp products and then from there formed the brand unbeatable again with those bag beat pulps. And then that morphed into how can we take beat pulp and all the great things that we know about it and its value and combine it with other ingredients that will help and benefit the horse and what are horse owners already doing that we could do that in such a way to save them some time and effort. And so the first product to come from that was a product called forage only, which is a combination of alfalfa, beet pulp and flaxseed oil. And then from there it became, OK, that’s a fantastic product and it is really flexible and can be used in a lot of ways.

But we’re asking owners to add some sort of balancer to add their own vitamins and minerals. And again, that’s a space where we could simplify life for them. And so Unbeatable then came up with Unbeatable Complete, which was a fully fortified product that would take that mixing out of the equation. Right now you could just feed one thing that came in a bag and was designed in a way to work for a lot of different horses. When we did that, we brought in a little bit of Timothy.

We also brought in flaxseed meal as well as the flax oil that was there in the beginning. That’s really what we’ve had on the market for the last year. And again, with that idea that we wanted to be grain free and we wanted to offer horse owners a way to utilize a forage only product in such a way that they didn’t have to be a short order cook in the back. They didn’t need to be mixing all the things. Our product didn’t require soaking, which a lot of times when people were mixing with traditional beet pulp products or even hay cubes or some of our hay pellets, a lot of times they were soaking that.

So by using a mini pellet, we were able to avoid that and just again, help people to simplify what they’re doing while also maintaining that idea of healthy natural goodness. Yeah, it is interesting because. I remember when I first started going down the rabbit hole of this more holistic nutrition approach to feeding horses. I come from basically just a very traditional like a venting boarding barn background, right? Like we fed, we have literally a green silo and they would come and just pump the green in and we just fed the trip.

And so not a lot of thought really went into, to me, this is just always how we had done it yet. Some horses got a hay stretcher or a handful of alfalfa cubes or whatever. But it was very kind of one-size-fits-all. And as I got down the rabbit hole of nutrition overall and then holistic nutrition, I was like, there is no way people who own or run barns could do this. Like, it takes so much time, so much measuring, so much prep.

And yeah, when you have two horses, it doesn’t really matter. When you’re a trainer operating a legit barn with 20 plus horses, that really matters. And when I found the unbeatable products, I was like, oh, look at this, they’re trying to solve that problem. And I don’t know if that was the initial sort of thought, but to me that was definitely. Now this can be like a commercial sort of thing.

When we’re talking nutrition, I think there’s so much and so many different directions people can go with it. So if you were to say these are the basics of nutrition, bare bones, it’s a kind of crash course, what would you say that is? Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a great question. And I think one of the things that may surprise some listeners is that most PhD nutritionist agree on all of these things and we have way more similarities.

I think that it doesn’t have to be as complicated often times as owners want to make it, or sometimes you have influencers out there, I think add to the confusion. Whereas I think if we can just keep it as simple as possible, everyone benefits and keep science kind of at the forefront of that. I think about what is that foundation, right? It’s forage and sometimes people get hung up on forage only forage focus where I want my horse to eat forage focused or whatever that might be a forage based diet. And most horses are right.

Whether you’re using a commercial grain or a commercial forage based feed or you’re doing that mixing on your own, there’s still forage first. Most of our horses are either on pasture or they’re getting hay. And so I think most people are already checking that box. But I do think it’s a great reminder to start there, right? We want to make sure that our horses are getting somewhere in that 1 1/2 to maybe 2 1/2.

And sometimes that number is variable depending on the horse, but around that 2% of body weight in forage each day as the base of our pyramid and what we’re doing for them. And you’ll hear a lot of people say feed the very best, hey, you can. And I think that’s a good rule of thumb. Now, what I would also say there though, is there are plenty of horses that if you feed them the best hay you can find calorically, they’re going to get too much and they’re going to struggle there. And so sometimes we might say maybe they need a little less quality hay so that they can have a little more of it.

Because we also know that nature designed them to eat all day long. And I think that we’ve learned that most of them do better when they have greater access to forage. And so we have to balance all those pieces. And once we’ve done that, now what’s the gap I need to make up? Is there a gap calorically meaning that my horse because he’s exercising or because my forage maybe isn’t as great of a quality because of where I live or what’s available to me, is it because he’s growing?

A lot of times there’s going to be a gap there. And that might be again, from calories or that might be from nutrients. And then we just have to look at how do we fill that gap? And that’s where you can do that in a few different ways. And it depends on how big is the gap.

Again, is it just that I need to provide him a little bit of nutrients that my forage alone can’t supply? We might be missing some vitamins and minerals. He might be missing some amino acids that maybe are not as available to him in that forage. Or is that gap bigger? And I’m trying to feed a racehorse and I have a big gap I need to fill in terms of energy as well.

And so based on what that gap is, I think guides us to the best approach to filling it. And when I’m like looking for a feed and I turn the bag around and I look at the nutrition label, what am I looking at? Let’s say sure, the most part these are moderate levels for horses, sure. I think one of the things is what you see there is not always going to give you great answers because in our current system, what we do is that we utilize a guaranteed analysis that has percent, right. So it’s going to tell us things like percent crude protein, percent crude fat, percent crude fiber.

It might have some vitamin and mineral guarantees and there’s going to be some flexibility there within the regulatory framework. So some of those things are going to have to be included from a regulatory perspective, protein, fat, fiber, good examples. Of that, some of those are. Going to be optional for that company to use that to say we’re going to also guarantee that this feed is going to meet the standard for the following nutrients. A good example of that is many companies have now gone to including sugar and starch within that GA so that as an owner you can determine if that’s an appropriate level of NSC or non structural carbohydrates for your particular horse as an example.

The problem with that is when we look at those numbers, whether that’s protein, maybe it’s an amino acid guarantee, when we look at those numbers, that percent really needs to be multiplied by the amount of that feed we’re feeding to determine how much of that nutrient we’re now providing to that. So a good example of that is let’s say I have a feed, we’re going to use big round numbers here that is a 10% protein feed and I’m providing it to that horse in 2 lbs a day. OK, so I can do the math and determine how many grams of protein that horse is getting from that. But if I have a second feed that is 20% crude protein, I’m going to look at that and go, Oh my gosh, it’s twice as high. But for that feed, I’m only feeding 1 LB of it a day.

In the end, it’s the same, right? And so that comes into play when we think about things like ration balancers. I might flip that background and it might be 25% crude protein, but the feeding rate is so small that if I were to compare apples to apples in terms of what is that feed actually providing that horse, those two numbers are now fair to compare. And so I think that’s the real challenge is that you have to make sure that you’re thinking things cohesively in terms of what they’re providing to that horse on a daily basis and not so much just those pure numbers across that guaranteed analysis. And that’s hard.

Math is hard, right? And so that’s where for a lot of us like leaning into, there’s some great online programs. We partner now with Kentucky Equine Research who has a great program called Microsteed that allows you to build diets with feeds from KER brand partner. There’s some other online tools you can get out a pen and paper, use Excel. But I do think that’s important in the day where not all things are created equal in terms of feeding rates.

And you should do the same thing if you’re providing A forage balancer in a feeding rate range like a supplement, right, where it might only be in grams per day instead of pounds per day. But we need to be able to math that out right and see how that really is providing nutrients to our particular horse. And so if I’m looking to. Let’s say I’m just looking to overall understand what my horse is getting from the feed. Like how do I know that?

Like I guess This is why you work with a nutritionist, right? You take blood and then they tell you, hey, your horse is like missing this stuff. So you need versus. OK on the back of the bag it says that this has 400I us of vitamin D if you feed 10 lbs of it a day. So I’m going to do that to make sure I get my.

A lot of it. We actually have to make some kind of assumptions and we’re actually better at looking at what the diet is providing and comparing that to what we know an animal of that age breeds, sex, exercise load, all of those things requires. And so we have these guidelines put out by the NRC or the National Research Council. And then based on other research that’s come out since that last publication, based on what we know from within our company in terms of proprietary research or things like that, we might adjust those numbers slightly. We might say, OK, the NRC says this, but we actually know that we have more success providing a little bit more biotin.

Like that would be a good example for us. We’re always going to provide more biotin in the diet than maybe what NRC says a horse needs. We see a lot of value there. Essentially, we’re going to be able to look at what are the worst requirements and now how am I meeting those with diet. If you have your hay tested, that’s fantastic because that’s going to really tell us what are we providing for them in again that foundation, that baseline of this and then to be able to really perfect that gap we’re filling in, that’s not viable for everyone.

And So what we do then is we really make assumptions about that. We say, OK, you’re feeding an alfalfa hay and you’re feeding a grass hay, you’re feeding a mix. And we are able to utilize some averages there, come to a pretty Dang close approximation. Unfortunately, aside from maybe vitamin E and selenium, there aren’t really great ways to determine nutritional status from blood test. There are for sure not good ways to do that with hair.

And so that’s I think something that is important to point out is that we would sure love more in non invasive ways of being able to look at a horse or pull hair, pull blood and be able to say this is exactly what they need. But that just doesn’t exist. So you think about people, the same thing is true there, right? We struggle to be able to say, gosh, you would do better with just a little bit more vitamin D in your nut. We just have to make some assumptions of go ahead and get the extra sunlight, it’s sure not going to hurt.

Yeah, You work in an office all day, going out in the sun for 10 minutes is probably going to do you more good. Exactly. Yeah. I guess I’m just always looking for ways that, like, it’s just easier for owners to understand the health baseline of their horse. And I feel like feeding is such a normalized part of the force industry that it’s such an easy thing to it’s like standing too close to something where like you may not even think of it as something that is either contributing or taking from like the health of your horse and yet like it probably is.

Keeping it simple is a really good way to think about this because a lot of times I find that the more complex owners make it, the more they start creating problems and getting themselves in trouble. I would say put some trust in the PhD nutritionist who work behind your favorite trusted brand because those companies that employ the PhD nutritionist are doing a lot of work to be able to say, here’s how what we put in a bag when fed at the rates that we tell you to feed it on that bag meet the requirements of Dang near all of those horses. Right now. We’re using that like again, we’ve made some assumptions based on what’s the quality of average forage you’re eating. We’ve made some assumptions based on average workloads, right?

And so, yes, it’s probably never going to hit 100% and there are always those special cases. The overwhelming majority, if you select that commercial feed, you feed that according to the rates on there. That’s a pretty Dang good start. And it tends to be better than, oh, I think I’m going to feed a little bit of this and a little bit of that and create my own best approach. A lot of times that’s when things start going a little more.

Sideways. Yeah, No, for sure. I know from the horse training side of things, I deal with a lot of problem behavioral issue horses and those are always the ones, right. The owner shows up at the barn and they hand me the tub of different supplements that their horses on. I’m like, oh, that’s just not what your horse is going to get a ration balance or the Timothy pellet and we’ll go from there.

Yes. And then surprisingly, those horses, I’m like, they really study these things. It’s like your supplement is really getting peed out. Let’s like fix a lot of these other issues first. Like your OTTB doesn’t need to be getting fed 10 lbs of oats twice a day and.

Then the calming supplement. Yes, exactly. The 80 calming supplements and the gut supplements. And, but that’s actually, the interesting thing is something you actually mentioned earlier was that a lot of these PhD nutritionists really do believe that the core kind of all the same things. And a while ago I interviewed 2 nutritionists, 1 was purely holistic nutrition and one was your average.

I actually think she worked for Kentucky Equine Research. And I went into it like, we’re going to really talk about a bunch of different things. And it was like, Nope, we talked about fiber, we talked about hay. We took it. It was like, Oh yeah, at the end of it, the core is these are hey, eating animals.

And it’s like humans, right? Like you eat your fats and your proteins and your carbohydrates. And if you’re an athlete, you’re going to eat a little bit more. And if you don’t do anything, you maybe need to eat a little bit less. And absolutely, horses are a bit the same way.

And I actually approach, I know more on the human nutrition side of things than necessarily the horse side of things. But when you have a horse who’s like allergic to everything, you get a pretty quick understanding of, oh, OK, this causes inflammation. And this doesn’t, oh, but except in the source, it doesn’t interact with the swell and it can feel so complicated when you’re in the middle of it and. That’s why I think sometimes things like Facebook and social media and even all the information that people can get can feel so overwhelming because you’re like, Oh my God, no. The issue is my horse has too much iron and it’s what do you eat for hay?

How much grainy, how much turn out, what are the basics? And let’s get it as simple as possible. You know, I laugh because I always used to. I did a lot of extension work right in my early university days. And so I’d always start with, what is your horse eating?

I would always get these super complex answers. And a lot of times they take those same people and I’d say hang out a second. Do you have a dog? Yeah, I have a dog. How do you feed your dog?

I buy XYZ brand dog too. OK, I scoop it out and I feed it to him twice a day. Like OK, what happens if he’s getting a little fat? I feed him a little less. What happens if he’s getting a little skinny?

Well, I feed him a little more and do it better than the pH DS and go back to feeding your horse like you feed your dog. Find the brand that you trust that meets the life stage of that animal, right? If you have an older dog, there’s a formula for that. If you have an athletic dog, there’s a formula for that. And you’ve trusted that somebody has appropriately adjusted the requirements to meet that particular class.

And so I think the same thing can often be true. Now then you get into the special cases. What happens when my dog can’t have chicken, right? The allergy dog, just like you have the allergy horse. And so we’ve made accommodations for that.

And then beyond that, there’s some preferences, right? If you want your dog to eat a grain free diet that exists. If you want your horse to eat a grain free diet, you know, that’s where we can come in and same thing in people. And I equate it to the idea of being a vegetarian. If that’s something that’s important to you, you can do that within those same confines of needing this much protein and this much carbohydrate.

And so those kind of offerings also exist right in the equine space. And I think we can allow those to exist and happen without feeling like that means that another option is bad, right. I think that’s sometimes where we get in trouble is we think that there’s only one answer when when oftentimes there can be many ways of getting there. Yeah, I know it’s always funny because clients, I’ll talk to clients and they, although I tend to approach things a bit holistically, they’ll be like, yeah, I’m really struggling to put weight on this horse or something. And I go, oh, add this feed and they look at me like, yeah, that’s a loud.

And I’m like, yeah, yeah, Back in my day, before we knew corn was toxic, the horses were getting corn oil, and then they’d be all hot in the winter. Cool. Like now there are so many feeds that you don’t really have to go to the grocery store and find the right kind of oil. And you can just. OK, Yeah, just put it on the high fat version of the same feed you’re feeding and you’re good.

Yes. No, it’s funny. I had somebody reach out to me last week and they had Horse who looked really poor, just was really struggling. And we talked about things like ulcers. But one of the things that came out of the conversation was the horse was just picky.

He liked this and not that. And at the end of the day, what I said to them was you need to feed him whatever he’ll eat. At this point for this horse, I’m just about getting calories into him based on his preferences and and how picky he is. I think we need to let him tell us, right. We just need to go with what he wants on some of this.

It’s I can want all day for him to eat the healthy version, but at the end of it, I just need to get him to eat something so that we get out of this situation that we’re in. And then once we get there, then we can start talking about our preferences. Yeah, so in the. Whole equine nutrition space. What are you the most passionate about?

What gets you the most giddy to talk about? Diane So for me, at the end of the day, it’s anything that has research to support it. That is a way that we can translate really cool science into something that is useful and applicable to the average horse owner. There are a lot of things that we can do and there’s an interesting space between, yes, there’s sciences out here and we can do that, but is it translate into something use it something that you can see? And so if we can have conversations around how utilizing more fat in your feet, let’s say, can help a performance horse because of glycogen sparing benefits.

And we can have a conversation around how that turns your horse from just a gas motor into gas and electric and he can put more gas in his tank to save for later. And that’s what really excites me is how can we take something that’s complex scientifically and allow you as an owner or a rider to see that benefit in your animal? Yeah, you know it. This kind of came up in another podcast, but I was talking to a guy who helps improve the bascule of show jumping horses and he had mentioned that sort of a lot of the job was figuring out how to get forces to like what the right recovery for horses looks like. How could nutrition play into the recovery aspect of a performance?

Like what? What nutritionally goes into like recovery? Yeah, that’s fascinating. I think you could take that a step further and say what nutritionally goes into fatigue, right? Because I think that’s another piece of that is how hard do we work to then have to be to recover from it?

How much did we drain the system to need to fill the system back up? One of the things that we talk about a lot, but yet don’t have complete understanding around in horses is kind of that idea about gas in the tank. So when we think about a horse and and particularly performing exercise, they’re largely using glycogen stored in their muscle right as that energy source. And there’s some interesting things that we know there where for instance, if we have a horse on a fat supplemented diet, we may actually be able to have higher levels of glycogen within muscle available for exercise. And you say that sounds feeding fat to get more glycogen.

Glycogen sounds like sugars and yeah, that is. But it’s because what we do there is we burn fat in that low energy stand in the stall walking around phase that allows us to leave more glycogen in that cell for when we needed an exercise and particularly in that higher intensity exercise. So then as we’re performing, we’re burning that glycogen. And so a lot of when we talk about fatigue for instance, there’s a lot of conversations around is that animal fatiguing because he is essentially utilized all the glycogen available to him. OK.

So can we postpone fatigue if I can put more glycogen in? So yes, to some extent the other side of that which gets to your question on recovery is, OK, I’ve utilized that glycogen. How long does it take to put it back and can I put it back more effectively? Is there a mechanism of feeding post exercise that allows that horse to bring up those glycogen levels more quickly? Things are contributing there.

That’s one of the interesting pieces about forage only diets is one of the criticisms was, well, without glucose, without higher levels of sugars and starches, how do you put that back in? But there’s a lot of research, particularly coming out of Europe that says, well, they can still recover without those high levels of sugars, of starches that we used to think we really needed in those high performing horses. And part of that is because we actually don’t understand all the ways in which the horse takes glucose up into that cell. This receptor that you and I primarily used to do that doesn’t seem to be the exact same way horses do that. So that’s an area where we have more to learn and I think that’s super exciting.

We have done some things and are continuing to work on some research with Kentucky Equine Research to look at that recovery efforts to look at some of our beet products and how that may have an impact there. We have a compound called Betaine that a lot of times people will know as an osmolite, meaning that it plays a role in hydration and the fluid within a cell, right? It can help regulate that. But there’s some interesting things we’re finding about how betaine may actually impact recovery from exercise and it may be based on some of those receptor types and something they’re super excited to to learn more about that for sure. Yeah, I know, I know.

They did some studies in humans what who do like ultra endurance stuff like Iron Man’s and Ultra Marathon and the effects of the ketogenic diet in those sort of situations because it’s similar, right? Where they’re tapping into this like glucose storage, the glycogen. And the whole thought was there’s no way you can do these long distances if you’re not supplying yourself with sugar. And the way that I know the fat at some point restores the same. So like instead of running on the sugar, you’re running on like a ketone, which is like the fat version of fuel versus like the carb version of fuel.

So it’s interesting that maybe it’s not necessarily the same mechanism, but that there are just multiple ways to look at even just at the baseline how to fuel for endurance or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. And we used to very much think that fats were really valuable and helpful to us as so long as we stayed at that maybe 80% or less of maximum exercise intensity. And then as we started to approach maximum, we saw this big shift towards glucose utilization. And if your sports hanging out in that realm, then that’s not very helpful for you.

Like we’ve said, we’ve seen that’s not necessarily true and that not only is it not an on and off switch that there’s always a balance, but that we can actually change and up regulate different pathways that will also influence all of that. So. What role does fiber play in the diet? Because you always hear that horses are grazing animals. Horses need fiber.

What what use is fire? So. Horses are really cool in that they rely upon all of the microbes in their hind gut to make fiber be able to be a really helpful energy source for them. So that’s real different than you and I for you and I, fiber, you often hear the term filler, and maybe not my favorite word there, but you think about that concept where it’s bulking, it’s maybe helping stool formation, but you don’t tend to utilize a lot of fiber for energy. But the horse, because of his symbiotic relationship with all those microbes, actually has the ability to break down that plant cell wall and extract what’s inside.

Or the microbes do. And when they do that, they create something that’s called a volatile fatty acid or a VFA. And that VFA becomes an energy source through the horses hindgut. So he’s going to produce these Vfas and a horse can get 8090% of his energy from those Vfas. So that is huge, right?

That is super, super valuable to them. It’s the same sort of concept that a ruminant uses, right? When we think about a cow and grass, those microbes in a ruminant live in their rumen, but they work in the same way in terms of breaking down that plant cell wall and allowing that animal to benefit from those nutrients that would otherwise be unavailable based on just enzymatic digestion. Like you and I would use. The horse is pretty cool though, because it starts out like us, where he uses enzymes to extract what he can from the diet of using that enzymatic digestion process, which allows him to get the proteins to get those simple carbohydrates, so the sugars and starches and allows him to utilize that fat.

So once he’s done that, then he passes that fibrous component to the hindgut and is able to utilize that for that additional energy. So that’s pretty cool. He’s that hybrid between the two. It’s that fiber that can be that energy source. That fiber also then provides for the health and well-being of that microbiome.

Now we used to just in the conversation there and say fiber keeps the bugs healthy, The bugs make energy. But what we’re learning more and more all the time is that healthy microbiome does so much more. But there are studies that microbiome, it’s all going to be interconnected to the immune system. It’s going to have connections to even things like joint health and stuff that we never really would have thought of. So it’s not just that fiber is the great energy source, it’s that fiber is really essential for keeping a lot microbiome right where it needs to be, which then connects back to every other system in the body.

I have a brother who has autism and I remember 10 years ago reading a study that looked at the gut microbiome of children who were autistic and their guts were like a wreck. Leaky gut and all sorts of other issues. And actually, when you cleaned up their diet, they presented with less, they were less symptomatic, aggressive. I remember that kind of first opening the door to be like, oh, wow, The gut as in Logan air Organism is so powerful though. Absolutely.

You know, and you always hear about people trusting their gut instincts and all of that. And it’s so fascinating when you get into sort of the leaky gut stuff and you’re like, Oh my God, this creates, they’ve linked leaky gut to like autoimmune diseases, like all sorts of other things that it’s no wonder, oh, if you can like improve the microbiome of your horses gut that maybe it just decreases inflammation overall. Absolutely. You got happier horses. Yeah.

So I think two things that are super interesting there. I’m going to try to provide some synopsis on a very cool study that came out of Europe. Essentially they looked at the microbiome or the population of bugs within the gut of some young horses and they followed these horses really from birth and tried to get an understanding of the maternal effects they are right. So some of that microbiome is being populated by the mayor. So that has all sorts of interesting connections when we think about is the mayor raising her own foal or is it another like a recipient and how does the genetics versus the epigenetics and environment and all those pieces.

But in this particular study they looked at the microbiome of these foals as they aged and then they followed them out and they looked at them all the way to where these were race horses. They were in training and they actually found a connection between the diversity of the gut and I think it was 30 days of life really early on and their racing performance later. That is absolutely fascinating to think about that having a more diverse, a well established microbiome early on would allow those animals to stay healthier, persistent training better. They lost less of training days due to injury or illness and in turn, those things resulted in them being winners at the track. Those kind of things I think are absolutely fascinating because I think it also speaks then to the importance of a great start for our equine athletes and how that can impact them throughout their life.

And when we think about a lot of times we are maybe thinking about why is my older performance horse having these osteoarthritis issues, how much of that may not have been that he didn’t get worked on a great surface related back to his gut health earlier? Fascinating potential there. Yeah, I think just in, in all beings, horse, human, whatever we like. Like we make so many scientific breakthroughs these days that I think people think science like we’re really far ahead on stuff. But I always go back to the we don’t even understand the fact that we’re awake.

Like the we don’t. We are such babies in understanding how within ourselves all of these things are connected and they’re finding out that the organs talk to each other in these like different ways and that your liver or something has like its own biological clock. It is so fascinating. I think what the next 10 years in terms of the breakthroughs and just understanding of how our inner world effects our outer world. Absolutely.

It’s going to be really fascinating and just real quick, like. When you’re talking about a diverse microbiome or a healthy microbiome, what in a horse goes into that? What does that look like with a young force or? Yeah, and part of that is we’re still learning in that area too. But I’ll tell you what we do know, and that is diversity is a good thing.

Typically what we find is that the greater diversity within the gut is going to be correlated with more positive outcomes, right. So you want diversity of those populations that are there. We also tend to know that the more forage based we can have a diet, oftentimes the more we are going to up regulate those forage utilizing quote UN quote good. I don’t really like categorizing things as good and bad, but maybe more positive outcome associated. Strains of bacteria and we will down regulate ones that are associated with more negative things.

So more inflammatory, more lactate producers get thrown under the bus all the time, right, Because we talked about those are the things that tend to up regulate. For instance, if you have starch spillover into the large intestine and then when you have those higher levels of lactate that might be negative on the structures of the feed. And so we understand some of those pathways, but those are the same concepts that we use to think about what is good, right. So we want make sure that we have the bacteria that present there that can continue to break down the forage. We like butyrate producer.

Butyrate is one of our volatile fatty acid. We really like it because we know that it is super important for the health and well-being of the gut itself. And so you threw out the term leaky gut. Leaky gut happens when we don’t have good junctions between the cells in the intestine. And so as those breakdown, they allow things to pass into the bloodstream that we don’t necessarily want to pass into the bloodstream.

So that could be other bacteria. For example, if we have butyrate producers, then we can keep the gut cells themselves healthy and help prevent that. As far as what functionally are the benefits to be gained from these bacteria, OK. And then we say, all right, this is a good guy and we want him. How do I support him?

So a good example of that would be something like when we say a prebiotic. So beet pulp is a great example of a prebiotic. It’s what we call a more soluble fiber source that is preferentially used by these butane producers. So when we have some of this beet pulp in our diet, then we tend to up regulate the amount of bacteria that are these butane producers and that has positive gut health effects. So that’s a kind of a good example of how we can support that.

When we talked about probiotics in the horse, the concept there and I’ll tell you in general they’re not all great in the horse. I think there’s maybe a few things that have potential still there. But in general, it was the idea of we’re going to provide some of those good gaps and we’re going to hope that providing those bacteria themselves will then ‘cause them to populate and take off. Now that didn’t always happen. We could say why is that?

Is it that they didn’t survive to get there? Is it because the environment of the gut at that point was not conducive to them sustaining and living and being successful there? But that’s our current level of knowledge, how we approach that? Yeah, it’s so interesting and. Fascinating.

Going to be interesting these next decades, especially as we introduce AI to everything and everything gets supercharged a bit in terms of injections of knowledge. And it’s fascinating. A lot of other species get way ahead of us in terms of their scientific understanding, but we can learn from that. We might be playing catch up to them, but it’s fascinating. For instance, there is something now that in poultry can actually take a picture of poultry droppings, poop and can determine the microbiome and then make almost real time dietary adjustments based on that, optimize the health and well-being of that bird.

That’s crazy, absolutely crazy. But that technology exists and it’s easier to exist there because genetically those birds are very similar to one another because there’s so many of them to study. Why is it they’re able to do that? But just the fact that kind of thing exists means that we are going to get better at being able to make those same kind of assessments for our own animals. But we also.

Have to just be careful to not like I said these are good and those are bad that it our understanding of all that is going to change and adapt over time. One of the things I wanted to mention, we’ve said inflammation a couple of times and I think there are still a lot of owners out there who we hear the word inflammation and we go inflammation bad. But inflammation is actually very necessary and very healthy to adaptation to recovery from exercise like we talked about earlier. Yeah, chronic inflammation is bad. Bad and that’s even where is the line.

We don’t always know those things. And a lot of times when I’m talking about that, I talk about optimizing inflammatory pathway because it’s not always about down regulating, which tends to be a lot of times we say I want it to be anti-inflammatory. You don’t want to be completely anti-inflammatory because you still want your horse to have. Adaptation to to exercise, to have adaptation to stress, those kind of things. And it never stops, right?

Like, you think you got it all nailed down and then you go, OK, this new thing just came out and uprooted everything that I thought I knew. And now we’re going to hit the ground running again and try to figure out where to go from here. But yeah, I feel like this has been such a fun conversation. So thank you for joining me. But how do people?

Follow along with what you guys do and all of that good stuff. Absolutely, thanks for asking. So we try to stay very active on our social media. We’re probably better at Facebook than we are maybe some of the others, but we put a lot out in terms of what Unbeatable’s up to. We have a new update to our Unbeatable complete coming up here November 1st.

We’re bringing Betaine into that and so you can certainly learn more on our socials about what that will bring to the table. We have a new ration balancer, Unbeatable Balance hitting the market N1 as well. So we’re excited about the extra number of horses that will allow us to feed who that’ll be a good choice for. But yeah, socials are great. We have just announced this week a partnership with Teton Ridge and the Cowboy Channel.

And so I think you’ll see more of Unbeatable and the offerings on the Cowboy Channel through the NFR, through Western Sports Roundup. And so we’re just excited to continue to have conversations and just to share with people that we are a forage based grain free offering and we’re there to help make life easy for you and to be just another potential way of feeding your horse the best way possible. Awesome. Thanks again for joining me. Thank you.