This is an abbreviation of unit 1 from the Advanced Equine Nutrition course. The complete text, a video, and quiz questions are available with The Horse’s Advocate membership. You can also purchase them separately. Note: Passing the Basic Equine Nutrition Course is required before starting the Advanced Course.

Unit 1 – Feeding Horses: Beyond the Basics

Welcome to The Advanced Equine Nutrition Course. Access is granted to those who have completed The Horsemanship Nutrition Course. In that course, I covered the basics of feeding horses. I used a bit of history, evolution, and physiology to explain the concepts. However, I needed to go deeper, not just for you, but for me too! Discovering what I was never taught has been eye-opening. I was misinformed about how food keeps us and our horses alive. It is noteworthy that agenda-driven businesses take advantage of promoting misleading information to sell products. Veterinarians, other horse professionals, and most horse owners have received instructions. These instructions have innocently harmed our horses, not helped them. More horses today are sick, lame, or both compared to horses living 50 years ago. With futuristic technology and advanced food and supplements worldwide, how can horses suffer more? This course will help us understand this paradox. It will equip us with the knowledge and tools to change our horses’ lives positively.

People often ask me questions about feeding horses. I get these questions at the farms I visit and through Rounds With Doc T on The Horse’s Advocate website. The Advanced Equine Nutrition course comes from realizing people’s different levels in:

1. understanding and retaining this information and
2. weeding through the abundant and conflicting information from other sources. 

I have addressed many discussions throughout my website and podcast material, but these are scattered. This course organizes information about equine nutrition. It gives you an understanding of horse feeding, which can be helpful when discussing it with others.

Here Is The Plan

I start our journey of understanding how horses use food. I do this by examining all the metabolic processes of life. These processes use all the substrates within the horse’s body. This first unit will be like looking at the puzzle picture before assembling the individual pieces.

I will then use more course units to discuss how each part depends on the others to make the whole. Alone, individual parts might not make sense; still, when combined, they work well.

The Units

Unit 2 – The Science Of Nutrition 

Unit 3 – Energy Flux: The Flow Of All Life

Unit 4 – Feeding Horses: Energy In

Unit 5 – DNA And Protein Synthesis

Unit 6 – Protein: An Essential Nutrient

Unit 7 – Fat And Carbohydrate: Not So Essential Nutrients

Unit 8 – Cell Metabolism: Energy Used, Stored, And Removed

Unit 9 – Lactate: The Universal Fuel

Unit 10 – Fructose: The Master Fuel For Survival

Unit 11 – The Addiction Of Sugar In Horses

Unit 12 – Stress: Its Impact On Horses

Unit 13 – Review: The Simplicity Of Feeding Horses

Key Points:

1. This advanced course on equine nutrition aims to understand what you place in the horses’ mouths and how that affects their health.
2. Once understood, you can discuss horse feeding with anyone interested or defend why you feed them the way you do.
3. Nutritional science for humans, especially for horses, may suggest a correlation, but causation is rarely found.
4. The whole process of life involves converting the energy stored chemically in food into electrical energy that is used immediately, stored for the future, or passed out of the body. This movement is called energy flux.
5. Feeding horses starts with understanding how energy from food is measured, how adjustments are made to balance the energy flux to life’s changes, and the results of long-term adjustments.
6. DNA is the master blueprint for all the proteins required for life. The processes of DNA transcription to RNA and RNA translation to protein are universal in all living things, allowing for life to continue onto future generations.
7. The horse uses biological substrates to build and maintain the body (proteins) or fuel metabolism (carbohydrates, fat). 
8. Proteins consumed as food are essential and should be considered first in any feeding program.
9. Carbohydrates and fats are not essential because horses can make them: glucose from gluconeogenesis (amino acids, lactate) and fat from bacterial digestion of cellulose.
10. Concentrations of these substrates on either side of the cell wall determine the flow of glucose and fat in and out of cells moment-by-moment.
11. The fuel substrates’ concentrations inside and outside the cells determine the metabolic processes used at that moment.
12. Lactate and fructose are unique fuels with specific purposes. Lactate (the universal fuel) drives the Krebs Cycle, producing energy use in cells, and fructose (the master survival switch) creates uric acid, which seasonally prepares horses for winter.
13. Under four defined conditions, horses can make fructose.
14. The need to eat sugar can become addictive when its availability is constant.
15. Stress can be acute or chronic, releasing different hormones that affect energy flux. Any stress decreases energy flux efficiency but is OK when temporary because life preservation is more important than temporary metabolic inefficiency.
16. Stress has a set point, but this can be elevated over time with continuous stress.
17. Feeding horses follows the Thermodynamic Laws. Feed protein first and enough carbohydrates and fat to maintain body condition for the season.