What They Tell You And What They Don't about Feed and Feed Supplements
In these times, competition for sales becomes "dog eat dog" and is often reflected in label wars and deceptive advertising. Only educated consumers can decipher hoards of non-descript jargon so that these dishonest (and I might add, very profitable) practices can be exposed. This article might be considered somewhat controversial because the "giants" so heavily involved in these endeavors don't want the public to be informed or ask too many questions. They would rather smother you in a jungle of "$25" technical words that you don't understand, but which sound very important and impressive. They also decorate their labels with huge amounts of expensve sounding units, but are really not expensive at all. I refer to this practice as "window dressing".
What You See May Not Be What You Get
Looking at a typical analysis of an overall supplement is rather more difficult than one might guess. Any technical in-depth analysis of any major feed ingredient will give seemingly huge amounts of nutrients. This includes a standard sweet feed too. You may be just looking at an analysis of some feed ingredient already in your mix and simply used as a cheap filler in your supplement. Often, these cheaper ingredients are used as fillers or extenders in supplements to dilute the active ingredients and pharmaceuticals that have to be added.
As a result, molasses, soybean meal, alfalfa meal, grain byproducts, plant forage products like gound up hay, bran, wheat middlings cleanings and screenings of wheat (like ground up corn cobs) known to contain high lvels of mold spores and dirt - a by product, and fermentation and solubles, which can usually be bought retail for 16¢ per pound or less at most any mill, are the major ingredients in most common feed supplements. These ingredients are more properly called "feed ingredients" and should not be included in genuine supplements. Do you buy human vitamins all mashed up in bananas or a jar of ground meat? Of course not. If you want the food items, you buy only them, and if you want the vitamins, you buy only them too.
Never is a food sold as a filler for vitamins in the human market, but just the reverse is common in the horse industry. Supplements should be exactly that - a supplement to the normal feeding to make up for the soil deficiencies so common today, extra stress on the animal, or to boost a sick animal, and help with environmental factors, but never to replace the standard feeding practice. Supplements provide the little extras missing in the standard feed due to industrialized farming and environmental conditions, not be an excuse to feed improperly in the first place.
If a true feed ingredient, or combination of them such as those listed previously, are the major ingredients in your supplement -- as evidenced by the first ingredient on the label (by law, major ingredients must be in a declining order of quantity), then you are paying a premium supplement price for mere feed ingredients, used in this case as a filler. Freight and handling charges and costs of larger containers to truck these fillers cross country can make the actual cost of true active ingredients you are really seeking $50/lb. or more.
What is in That Filler Anyway?
Of course, if you are one of those who must satisfy your mental picture of giving that great big horse a little more quantity, and you have the healthy wallet to do so, then paying such a real exaggeration in actual costs may not bother you. If the price does and you still must have the fillers, you can make your own and at bargain prices too. Just buy a concentrated supplement and dilute to your heart's content. You save money, using local fillers (feed ingredients). and you satisfy your eyeballs too. But it's the quality of the supplement ingredients the horse gets that really counts.
Another interesting fact about some of the filler is that they are often waste products (by-products) of industry. Although they may have some nutritive value, they may contain high levels toxic elements as well, since they are not made specifically or processed to be food products. This fact becomes even more disturbing when it is realized that horses in the U.S. are not considered food animals (for human consumption) and fall somewhere under the "pet" rule. The laws for the manufacture of feeds and feed additives including supplement, for food animals, such as cows, chickens and pigs, is much stricter than for "pets".
This lenience, coupled with the fact that horses are considered by most owners as "members of the family" (with all the emotional ties that phrase implies) makes a pretty target market for industrial subsidiaries looking to channel their waste products toward a profitable end. The next time you are in a feed store, compare the vast number of feed supplements for horses and the four color full page very expensive magasine ads that go with them to the meager number for poultry, cows or pigs, the real feeding industry of the nation. Doesn't that tell you something?
A familiar example of the window dressing that goes on in pet foods is dog food. The protein percentages may be really high on the label, but what they don't tell you is that those meat by-products may really be hair and feathers very non-digestible protein products! Manufacturing might even add low quality fish meal oil, heavy with toxic chemicals from junk fish in shallow more polluted waters and unfit for human consumption, used for the sole purpose of pet foods. This practice will boost up the IU's (International Units) of vitamins A, D on the label, but such "bonus" ingredients themselves aren't listed and don't have to be by law.
Other industrial wastes include fish and meat meal and milk products from animals too high in antibiotic residues or chemical contaminants, unfit for human consumption. The pet food industry is often the bottom of the line for ingredients, simply because its products pose no human threat. In a three-year study nearly 47 million pounds of food produced in the U.S. was either destroyed or diverted to non-human use, as a direct result of FDA enforcement. And, another 1.5 million pounds of food offered for export was refused entry and exported back or destroyed. Considering the quality of much of our human food that does pass inspection, that says a lot.
Sanitation violations, such as rats, mice, insects, birds, molds and foreign material were responsible for the largest destruction and diversions from food channels. Other sources of fillers in pet foods and supplements can be by-products of a non-food industry itself, such as cottonseed meal. Since these items are not grown as a primary food, they can contain residues from pesticides allowed on non-food crops but considered too dangerous for use in food crops. So much for the fillers . . .
The Additive Avalanche
Turning The Tongue Against The Brain
Additives are a "fun" group too. They include artificial flavors and colors meant more for the owner who does the feeding, than the animal who does the eating. If animals (horses included) are indeed color blind, as most researchers say, what advantage would artificial colors have in pet foods and horse supplements and feeds save for the eye appeal to the owner, their real target who is actually doing the buying?
Most additives really aren't that harmless, either. They contribute nothing to the product's actual nutrition or safety, except for an extended shelf life. There are some 35 colors currently permitted for food use, nearly half synthetically made from petroleum distillates and coal tars. They are responsible for hyperactivity in sensitive children and implicated in certain types of cancer. Green coloring may be used in pelleted products and feed supplements which use low grade hay as filler. The coloring covers up to your eye the true nutritional value the product doesn't have.
Preservatives are also considered additives. They are used solely to increase the shelf life of the products and except for this "benefit," contribute nothing nutritionally. Usually the more processing, the more preservatives are needed. BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene), a common preservative, was removed from the "GRAS" (Generally Recognized As Safe) list in May, 1977 by the FDA and placed in an interim category to await further testing. BHT and BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole), another common preservative, do the same job of antioxidant as vitamin E, but are cheaper, of course, so that is why they are commonly used in feed supplements and feeds, have not been tested as possible carcinogens, but they have been shown to cause increased blood cholesterol levels, loss of hair, and birth defects in experimental animals. Ethoxyquin is another common preservative in pet products, and it has been shown to have toxic effects on thyroid rarely found in the human market.
Vitamins and Minerals - When the Balance Sheet Doesn't Add Up
This topic, probably my biggest gripe in the whole manufacturing business, involves the difference between biologically active (live) and biologically inactive (dead) nutrients that appear the same on the label. Labels certainly don't tell the average consumer much in this department, and they can fool practically everybody but a chemist. "Not fair," you say -- I agree, but with the free enterprise system as the "American Way", the consumer is left pretty much to fend for himself. The snake oil peddlers of the past were allowed their customers, and they still are today too.
The B complex vitamins and their companion enzymes are a topic of concern. They are mostly heat sensitive, becoming inactive or killed at temperatures around 120º. The standard temperatures for most pelleting processes are appoximately 160º, adding stem and pressure for the likes of an autoclave. The advantage of a pelleted product, that of non-sifting, doesn't really balance out if the horse is not a sifter anyway, and most horses I have met aren't. The clincher? The killed vitamins and enzymes that make them work are still listed on the label-- they actually are there--but just are not active in the body. This is when the balance sheet really doesn't add up. Products don't have to be pelleted to have this fault either -- just cooked and inactivated in one way or another.
Minerals face similar problems in availability. The term "natural" can be applied to virtually anything, even "dirt" (which, incidentally, comes pretty close to some of the mineral supplemnets on the market). Many are mined substances and can act in the same irritating way as can "dirt." Results can take the form of "sand colic" if the horse is sensitive, or more commonly, low-grade abrasive irritation to the lining of the intestine which causes scar tisue to form there. Scar tissue does not absorb nutrients well, and over a long period of time the use of such products can actually cause a horse to become a "hard keeper" due to the reduction of normal surface are in the gut for absorption. The word "natural" has been so abused that the really good products on the market are hurt for lack of proper description.
Minerals should be in a biologically usable form, compatible with and usable by the body. All chemical forms of the same mineral are not. To give an example of the personalities and activities of the different chemical forms, let's look at ordinary table salt. Composed of the burning and poisonous elements sodium metal and chlorine gas, these two undesirables bind to each other in a special way and become not only non-toxic, but absolutely essential to life. So too with the other minerals; their chemical form or what the minerals are bonded to, is just as important as the minerals themselves- actually more!
Even plants must have their minerals in a biologically usable form, and they accomplish this feat through the bacteria at their roots, which do these conversions for them. True bioavailable nutrients can even be fed through the leaves directly in a process called "foliar feeding." The most extensive work done with bioavailable minerals has been done with amino acid (protein) chelated minerals. These chelates are absorbed by animals mostly through the stomach wall, as they are "pre-digested" chemical forms. Hard keepers and Environmental Illness compromised bodies benefit well from these chelates. Comparing the price of amino acid chelates to cheaper acidifying obsolete chemical forms such as sulfates and phosphates really misses the boat here. They really are incomparable, and now you know why.
The adulteration of our pet food, ultimately affecting our horse products, is not going to change radically for the better in the near future. Only ads and promotions will change to become more alluring to the consumer. This reason is why consumer edutcation is so important today, to be able to evaluate the formulation of feeds, and the nutrient supplements of your animals being fed. They are at our mercy. Poor quality sources of nutrients will pay back dividends of less than optimum performance. Good nutrition for quality feeds and supplements tailored to the conditions of the world we live in now, is really an investment in the future, both for the health of our animals and ourselves.
© 2011 Vita Royal Products Inc.
