The Economics
of today's horse industry has changed nearly 180° from those that fueled the same industry 100 years ago. My grandfather plowed his farm on Tuesday with the very same horse he used to pull the family to town and then race - on Sunday- and THEN-pull the family wagon home again! But, the world was a different place then.
Today, all 50 states are reporting continuously declining levels of nutritional minerals in farm soils. This is coupled with ever increasing air, water, rain and fertilizer contamination by industrial toxins that compound the devastating effects of malnutrition of our food sources exponentially, by adding severe toxic effects in themselves. In short, the old ways of doing things just don't work any more.
The rise of alternative medicine, as a search for new ways of fixing conditions that current orthodox medicine no longer can, is testimony to the failures. Concurrently, the emergence of new diseases and disease syndromes never seen before, are adding fuel to this fervent drive for knowledge and action. There is a "back to nature" call now and it is long overdue. The old adage that "you can't fool Mother Nature" has never before proven so true. In fact, that is just what the Vita Royal Nutrition Program is all about.
Cheap Ingredients = Low Quality Nutrition
Standard feed tag labels now read like a group of unrecognizable ingredients, like "processed by-products...". A "by-product", by definition, has little to no nutritional value. Don't we get enough of that in the standard feed products that are "supposed" to be nutritional and are not? Do we really need to dilute digestive juices in the gut even more by extending them into near oblivion with fillers? This accounts for more "Hay Bellies" than one can imagine. The virtual size of the total digestive is not reduced on its way toward elimination, because little of it can be absorbed as nutrition. It continues to expand the gut - all the way out - making more manure for you to clean up too.
There is a mathematical proportion to this too. In a proportional ratio, the greater the expansion of a circle, the smaller the circumference or outside measurement relative to its area. This is why cells are triggered to divide at a certain size, or in the case of cells, the volume, and we never, ever hear of "the Cell that ate New York"!
Cells absorb nutrition through their membranes. If the inside of the cell (the cytoplasm) outgrows the relative ability of the membrane to provide food, the cell divides to provide more membrane in proportion to cell contents. The gut tube or digestive tract functions this way too. The more it is expanded or swelled, the less surface area which is also absorptive tissue, will come in contact with the digestive. In short, smaller, more concentrated meals are better absorbed and thus, more nutritional.
About Fillers
Some by-products such as "wheat middlings" or "wheat wheat-mids", which are the leftover cleanings and screenings of the wheat that goes into the human food chain, are so laden with dust, dirt and mold spores that they resemble granary floor sweepings. Of course, with these additions comes the necessity for high levels of powerful preservatives are created - which brings us to the next consideration. "Ethoxyquin" is so powerful a preservative, that rarely does it find its way into the human food chain. Could it be because of its known toxic effects on the thyroid gland, that master of all cell functions in every living organism? Per chance! Per chance! Or some other sinister undoing of normal and healthy biochemistry.
Great digestive power has been divinely bestowed upon microorganisms of the world to digest and decompose all once-living matter into recyclable elements. This is to make sure we aren't burdened with collections of dinosaur and other bodies around, that tie up valuable nutrients forever and prevent future life cycles. Digestive microorganisms are important in the body too, helping do that which the body's enzymes alone can't.
When toxic preservatives are added to food stuffs that were programmed to decompose with help from these divinely appointed microorganisms, we interfere with their duties and even kill them. How then can we EVER arrive at the conclusion that these chemicals can enhance the activity of anything living? The only life enhancement that these preservatives add to is the total shelf life!
"Pelleted" & Extruded Feeds
So, can we "cook" the animal feeds, then, to preserve them - "naturally?" Well, the "cooked" feeds currently are either "pelleted" at the standard 160°F or "extruded" at 350°F (yes- the temperature of deep fat frying)! At temps over 120°, you say "Good-bye" to helpful digestive enzymes that are actively contained within the food itself, and to several more vitamins. Some essential mineral carriers "bite the dust" as well. Compare this to the principle behind "blanching" your "veggies" prior to freezing to extend freezer life, and your "veggies" only subjected to a slow dunk to be effective, you can see just how sensitive these enzymes are!
This is not a workable solution. For extruded feeds, we have a far more serious problem. We now know that oils subjected to high heat produce "trans fatty acids" that are damaging to cell membranes and inflammatory in the body. They are totally unnatural products that the living body does not know how to deal with. They have been implicated in everything from cancer to heart disease to autoimmune disease- and rightly so.
Dangerous Fat Content
Some horse feeds, dog and cat foods are often known for their high "fat" content as well - and to add insult to injury, that "fat" is often significant amounts of lard saturated fat trimmings from the slaughter houses. These fats are also the storage depots for environmental toxins and growth hormones that the food animal was fed or exposed to. Do we really want these in ANY food source, even pet food?
Horses are vegetarians by nature and by genetics. They have even greater difficulty digesting these saturated, cooked, contaminated, trans fatty acids than we do as meat-eating humans. Now, with E.I. rising as an epidemic, the very LAST thing we need for sensitive equines are inflammation enhancing ingredients in our food sources! It takes more and higher quality nutrition to restore health to a sick body than to maintain a healthy one in the first place. This fact is a given.
So, with a sick environment and a sick planet, we need to do more, nutritionally, than if the planet was healthy. This is why the old ways don't work anymore, which brings us to the next problem, of mineral supplementations.
In the "old" days before our soils were "farmed out" and soil deficiencies were not a problem, little mineral enhancement of feeds was necessary. Yes, we did have to add some minerals especially for certain minerals in known deficient areas like the Great Lakes Basin, because we were asking our animals to do more work than they would have existing wild in Nature, but we took better care of them too - to extend their productive lives. We needed our horses for survival - in food production, war, and transportation. With smaller needs to be met, we could use the common inorganic salt forms like sulfates and phosphates for foods that were cheap to produce. And, even though they weren't completely non toxic, we only needed a small amount, so toxicity wasn't a problem.
Mineral Deficiencies
This is not true today, however. Mineral deficiencies are high and climbing, aggravated even more by the biochemical interferences of the heavy metal toxins and acid rains. We can't use the same old chemical salts of sulfates and phosphates for they are acid- causing, adding to the organic acid toxins already in the environment, and in living systems too, and the phosphate pollution long ago recognized. We live in a "sewer of phosphates" already. Why do we assume that the body would want even more? The biggest complaint in the sulfate bunch comes from copper sulfate, which doubles as a drain cleaner you can buy at the hardware or a "water purifier" to kill algae in ponds - you know, that pretty blue stuff?
Industry uses the supplement phosphates and sulfates because they are cheap to produce, and they say that the horse industry itself ,needs "cheap" to survive anymore. We think there is a better way, a "back to nature way" that is even MORE economical than the "cheap" industry programs - AND one that solves the many problems of nutrition today.
A Quality, Nutritional Universal Grain Mix for Less
Vita Royal's Custom Nutrition Program addresses the problem of "junk" feeds by providing a recipe that you can take to a fully equipped feed mill and have made for you - a truly "fresh" grain mix without fillers, preservatives, questionable fats or undesirable mineral supplements. Even better, it currently costs about 40-50% LESS that those bagged commercial feeds with all the "extras." This feed can be used for most any horse (with good teeth of course) like a universal grain mix, or choose one of the other two recipes if your horse has special needs.
Easily customize your program to YOUR horse's needs with our biochemically formulated supplements. No fillers, which means 100% active ingredients go into your horse.
To tailor the program to individual horses with different ages, sexes and health problems. This helps a lot because you don't need to get a whole load of feed for just one horse, your whole barn can benefit too.
No matter what your needs, Vita Royal has a custom program that makes it EASY for you and BETTER for your horse. We take painstaking effort in bringing our customers the highest quality ingredients with purity that is near impossible to find in the horse industry. With ratios of supplements tailored for specific uses and even general maintenance, even considering different age groups, our products pioneer the equine industry.
© 2011 Vita Royal Products Inc.
