Forageplus

23/10/2026

Bit of excellent science for you 🩵

Welcome to Science Friday.
Today’s topic is:
𝙁𝙧𝙪𝙘𝙩𝙖𝙣𝙨: 𝙎𝙪𝙜𝙖𝙧, 𝙁𝙞𝙗𝙚𝙧, 𝙂𝙤𝙤𝙙 𝙤𝙧 𝙀𝙫𝙞𝙡?

One thing that has been firmly established is that if you pump more than 5 lbs of inulin fructan into the stomach of a horse, you will induce endotoxemia that ultimately leads to laminitis. This does not happen in the real world setting so let’s move away from this artificial construct into something more logical.

First, a common point of confusion. Are fructans “sugars” or “fiber?” It depends on whether you’re referring to plants or mammals. To a plant, fructans are sugar. Plants break the fructan chain into free fructose molecules to use as energy for growth. Mammals lack this ability and instead, the fructan chain is broken down by bacteria, so in this case, fructans act as prebiotic fiber. Both terms are correct if used in context with their respective physiology.

If we go way, way back to equine evolution, the horse adapted to major changes in grasslands by developing a massive fermentation vat, housing billions of bacteria capable of fermenting fiber to volatile fatty acids (VFA’s). VFAs supply about 60-80% of daily equine energy requirements, sourced from structural fiber, soluble fiber, and oligosaccharides like fructans and those of the raffinose family. This is a steady-state fuel source that does not rely on surges of glucose, ideal for a free-ranging animal.

In other mammalian species, fructans enhance the growth of beneficial bacteria, short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) production and improve calcium and magnesium uptake. Most of the equine research involving fructans has been focused on potential harmful effects, so it is challenging to find work related to potential benefit. There is none related to naturally occurring fructans in forage. Researchers used what is commercially available and that is typically inulin fructan.

Small doses of inulin supplementation have been shown in horses to lower triglycerides and cholesterol (PMID: 33781429), moderately improve insulin sensitivity in obese horses (PMID: 20870952), reduced disruptions in the microbial population after exposure to high starch (PMID: 17940163), promote the growth of anti-inflammatory bacteria in the equine gastrointestinal tract (PMID: 34093482) and modest improvement in glucose and insulin clearance when a prebiotic compound with 46.6% fructan derived from Jerusalem artichoke meal was fed (PMID: 28627061). Current research is aimed at colic prevention, explained in this thorough review paper. (PMID: 41815495)

None of these studies are earthshaking or would radically alter feeding recommendations. They do point out that when fructans, even those not typically consumed by equines, may be beneficial. The fructan overload experiments not only created an unrealistic fear, but also spawned “treatments” and supplements, for example, feeding hops to target lactic-acid producing gut bacteria, or to administer “gut-buffers” to offset the “lactic acidemia” from fructan fermentation, or marketing enzymes (fructanase) to break down fructans before they reach the hindgut (some fructan fermentation takes place in the equine stomach, naturally). Given how many eons horses have wandered the earth in some form, constantly adapting to their environment and food sources, it’s hard to imagine in the last 20 years that a staple of their diet is suddenly a problem that needs buffering. I’m in full agreement with this concluding sentence from Cottone and colleagues (PMID: 41815495), “Proposed mechanisms and therapeutic implications are based primarily on extrapolation from non-equine models and limited equine observational data, highlighting critical knowledge gaps and the need for controlled, hypothesis-driven studies in horses.”

How to access references: Go to PubMED (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) and enter the PMID number in the search box.

Kathleen Gustafson, PhD
President and Research Advisor, ECIR Group Inc.
Text to Give anytime: Text 𝗘𝗖𝗜𝗥 𝗧𝗢 𝟴𝟰𝟰-𝟴𝟰𝟰-𝟲𝟴𝟰𝟰. Thank you!

23/10/2026

🤣 What’s your Walter called 🐴 ?

22/10/2026

DOES YOUR HORSE REALLY NEED THAT RUG? 🐴

Just because you’re cold doesn’t mean your horse is!

Horses have their own internal heating system. Microbes ferment fibre from hay in the hindgut, producing heat that helps keep them warm throughout winter.

Combine this with a thick winter coat, adequate forage, freedom to move and shelter, and many healthy horses cope perfectly well without rugs.

WHEN MIGHT RUGGING HELP?

• Underweight horses struggling to maintain condition
• Clipped horses with reduced natural insulation
• Older, ill or vulnerable horses that struggle with the cold
• Arthritic horses who may benefit from additional warmth and comfort
• Horses exposed to prolonged cold rain and wind without shelter

WHAT ABOUT OVERWEIGHT HORSES?

Body fat provides insulation. Unnecessary rugging reduces heat loss and may make weight management harder.

This is particularly relevant for horses with EMS or laminitis risk, where maintaining a healthy body condition is so important.

And please don’t rug your healthy Shetland or hardy native simply because YOU feel cold!

A FEW PRACTICAL TIPS:

• Feel the base of the ears for warmth, but assess the whole horse.
• Check beneath rugs for sweating, rubbing or overheating.
• Consider rugging overnight and removing rugs during warmer days.
• Remember, cold and dry is very different from cold, wet and windy.
• Always provide suitable forage, fresh water, shelter and freedom to move.

RUG FOR YOUR HORSE’S NEEDS, NOT YOUR OWN FEELINGS.

Natural thermoregulation is part of being a horse. Our job is to support it, not automatically interfere with it.

Does your horse wear a rug in winter, or do you let their natural coat do its job? 👇

22/10/2026

Shout out to the Island Riding Centre on the Isle of Wight - all their horses are bit free and children have a fantastic grounding in welfare based care and training. Meet Donald 🩵

20/10/2026

A 500 kg horse can eat around 50–70 kg of fresh grass a day and produce around 15–25 kg of fresh poo.

Keep poo-picking for a year and you could shift 5.5–9.1 TONNES. Suddenly, that wheelbarrow feels like gym equipment!

Tag your poo-picking partner. They deserve to know their annual lifting total 👇

Figures are illustrative: grass intake and poo output vary with diet and management. Fresh grass contains a lot of water.

19/10/2026

Extremely important to understand the way that grazing can affect horses with poorly controlled base line insulin. Click the link in the original post to read information from Dr Kellon

Winter pastures are not safe for Metabolic horses. Here's why:

https://drkhorsesense.wordpress.com/2025/01/05/are-winter-pastures-safe-for-metabolic-horses

Text-to-Give anytime: Text 𝗘𝗖𝗜𝗥 𝗧𝗢 𝟴𝟰𝟰-𝟴𝟰𝟰-𝟲𝟴𝟰𝟰. Thank you!

19/10/2026

Hay nets! Take a deep breath! 🙈 how’s your love hate net relationship? 🤣

17/10/2026

It’s the horse’s fault. Isn’t it?

He kicks. He bites. He throws his head up. He swishes his tail. And sometimes, he simply stops resisting.

Do you call it naughty, stubborn, aggressive or disobedient or do you stop trying to correct the behaviour and started asking WHY it happens?

Pain. Fear. Frustration. Confusion. Conflict. These are all experiences that can influence how a horse responds to the world we create for them.

We choose their equipment, control their environment, decide how they are trained and often determine how much choice they have.

Yet when they communicate that something isn’t right, we so often blame the horse.

And perhaps the most worrying horse is the one who has learned that saying no makes no difference.

Silence is not always relaxation. Compliance is not always happiness.

Every behaviour has a reason, even when we don’t yet understand it.

Have you stopped labelling. How do you listen? Drop your thoughts in the comments.

16/10/2026

How it started ⤵️

In 2006 I moved my horses to my own land. A dream come true for any horse owner but the dream became a nightmare.

For the first few months the horses were fine then things started to change.

First there was the strange skin issues. Like a spot where the hair follicle became oozy and then the hair fell out and my horses lost their hair. It started with one horse and then spread to the other two.

Then the hooves started to show problems - white line disruption, holes which were deep and trapped dirt and stones. The inevitable was a vet visit which this failure in the white line results in.

Overall the horses started coats looked dull and they struggled with lethargy and low levels of energy.

I wracked my brain as to what might be causing it but nothing anyone suggested seemed to help until one day I was chatting to a friend on the phone.

‘Oh we had those problems’ she said ‘they’ve all gone - we learnt about nutrition through hay and grass analysis from Dr Kellon, I’ll send you the information’.

Now the interesting thing is 6 months earlier I had, had a company carry out analysis and they said everything was fine. I dug that report out and looked it through the lense of Dr Kellon’s approach and I cried, the manganese was sky high, so high my horses were being exposed to toxic levels which was totally blocking the up take of copper and zinc. Guess what copper and zinc are crucial for strong keratin bonds and yes skin and hooves they’re made out of keratin.

Protein too, was so low, that it was not even half what they needed without any work. And YES you have probably guessed that keratin is almost wholly made out of protein.

No wonder things were so bad! The very building blocks my horses hooves and skin needed were missing.

I set to, using Dr Kellon’s ratio approach, worked out what was needed to balance everything and a few months later - glossy, healthy coats, no skin issues, hooves with a tight white line, bare feet, strong and sturdy and working well, horses with a bright twinkle in their eye with the energy to enjoy their lives again.

So Forageplus was born, because what I realised was no horse feed company was looking at analysis of forage correctly and checking or understanding what needed to be matched to the grass and hay the horses were eating.

20 years later I know it’s still the best way to balance horse diets, and now Forageplus has collected over 12,000 samples of forage which has created a powerful database.

This is why every Forageplus diet starts with the grass and hay a horse eats!