Welcome to today's webinar, kindly sponsored by Equine America and hosted by Equine America's technical team. Thank you very much for joining us. My name is Katherine Rodenko.
I'm one of the nutritionists on the technical team, and I will be chairing today's session. I would like to introduce you to Deborah Leebeater, our senior nutritionist, and Doctor Catherine Tuckett, our equine vet. Following today's presentation by Catherine, we will all be available for questions at the end.
If you have questions, please put these in the Q&A box below. For comments or if you have any technical difficulties, please pop these in the chat box. I will now hand you over to Deborah.
Thank you, Catherine. Once again, welcome, and we just wanted to take a moment to introduce you to Equine America and to reiterate how delighted we are to be sponsoring this lunch and learn session. Now you might be surprised to learn that despite the name, Equine America is actually a British family owned company and has been for the last 30 or so years.
So just for a little background, the Equine American name actually came about because our original Qortiflex joint supplements were indeed imported from the US. But since those early days, our range has significantly expanded and grown and is now, we're proud to say, available globally. We've got the state of the art manufacturing facilities and warehouses, not only in the UK but also in the EU and the USA which allows us to export to I think it's now over 50 countries worldwide.
So we very much hope that as busy vets and nurses, you'll appreciate the information and research that Catherine's going to present today. As it's this research which forms the foundation of the formulations of all our supplements, including the vet only range. We're providing targeted evidence-based nutrition to support and complement veterinary treatment, whether that's for health and wellbeing, for recovery or for performance.
So the vet only range is only available via vets, either dispensed directly from your own pharmacy or via our unique and easy referral code system for your clients to use. Our supplements are all formulated by our own in-house team of experienced vets and nutritionists. And as mentioned, we use the latest research and evidence to ensure that you can confidently recommend them to your clients.
We pride ourselves on our transparency. We've got clear, very detailed labels and supporting information, which makes it super easy for you and your clients to know exactly what levels and amounts of key ingredients you're recommending and feeding. And we're also delighted to confirm that our technical team are available for individual diet and case support for both vets and for your clients if required.
And there's a final but really important point, all of our supplements are Betaops and UFAS accredited, which gives you complete reassurance that you can safely recommend equine America supplements for all horses, ponies, and donkeys in your care, including those that are competing and racing at the highest level globally. So now I'm delighted to hand you over to my colleague, Doctor Katherine Tuckett. Thank you Catherine and Deborah.
So thank you everyone for joining us today, wherever you are in the world. Let's get started. The title of this webinar is not just Fairy dust, exploring the evidence behind nutritional supplements.
So today we're going to explore the evidence behind some key ingredients found in equine supplements with a focus on digestive support, and we'll briefly at the end touch on joint supplements. Unfortunately, supplements and nutrition is a huge topic, so we're not going to have time to go do a deep dive into every ingredient out there. So I'm just going to focus on a couple of interesting topics with some recent research that can be used practically to support your clinical cases.
At the end we're going to obviously open up . Open up the floor for questions and I'll be joined by Catherine and Deborah, so feel free to put anything relating to nutrition in there. So here's just a few facts and figures just to put supplements into perspective for you.
I appreciate some of you around the world are are joining us from around the world, but these figures are from the UK. Despite a drop in horse numbers in recent years in the UK, down to 726,000 horses, we, supplement sales have almost trebled. They're up to 100 million.
So whether or not you believe in supplements, the fact is your clients are going to be buying them, with 72% of horse owners and riders buying supplements based on the Beta National Equestrian Survey in 2023. So it's really important that you understand their benefits and their place in your treatment programme. And just a reminder that nutrition is just one part of the jigsaw to horse health, and by using nutrition appropriately, it will help support the health and welfare of the horses under your care.
So hopefully by the end of this webinar, you'll feel more confident recommending supplements to support your clinical cases and providing targeted nutritional support. So when you go into any feed shop, as shown in and it's a typical picture here, this is just one shelf, or if you search online, the number of supplements available can be overwhelming, so how on earth do you choose? And as a vet, what are you looking for in a supplement to give you confidence to be able to recommend those supplements to a client.
So the first thing we always want to know as evidence based practitioners is what is the evidence to support them. Or as a minimum, we want to know it will do no harm and that it's safe and will complement our veterinary treatment, and that it's not going to interact with any medication you may be prescribing. So this can be tricky if you don't know what's in the supplement.
So I also always want to know exactly what's in it, so I look for transparency ingredients. Do the company tell me what is in every scoop and how much? Is it fairy dust levels or a meaningful contribution, or is it excessive that could lead to toxicity risk when added onto it, onto the existing diet?
You also want to know that there's full traceability on the ingredients from field to factory, field or factory to feed bucket. And then this is going to lead into sustainability and ethics, as well as compliance with competition rules. Many of our horses will be competing under FBI rules or rules of racing, but compliance isn't just about clean sport, it's also about feed law.
And regulations will vary between countries and also medicine rules, in here in the UK it's the VMD. So when you're looking for a supplement, this can be a really useful tool. Look for an externally validated and audited certification.
Here in the UK and increasingly recognised around the world, the Beaten Ups logo is a great place to start as it's strongly recommended by the BHA and British Equestrian. This logo means that the company has undergone a rigorous quality assurance is part of a rigorous quality assurance scheme designed to reduce the risk of natural and other prohibited substances in equine feed and supplements. To display the NOPS logo on labels, companies have to be independently audited annually and comply with stringent manufacturing and storage procedures.
The scope of beaten Ops encompasses every stage of the manufacturing process, right back to the field through to the finished product. It includes the sourcing, storage, transport and actual processing. To find the logo, you just need to look on the label or visit the Beaten Ops website to use their NOPS certificate checker.
And just another point while we're talking about NOPPs, by the nature of naturally occurring prohibited substances, you can never 100% guarantee that a supplement is totally free from naturally occurring prohibited substances. Obviously we're talking about NOPPs here. There are other schemes such as the NASC seal of approval in the USA and GMP plus in Europe that may be useful depending on where you are.
So as Hippocrates said let food be thy medicine. I love this quote, even all that time ago it was recognised that nutrition is so important for health, but I would just like to flag that food is not a medicine, and this statement would not be BMD compliant. So adverts making and labels making medicinal claims, i.e.
To treat or prevent a disease, are a red flag for you when looking at supplement tubs. Avoid supplements making claims to cure, heal, treat, prevent or protect, for example. For further information, the VMD provided guidance on marketing non-medicinal products with a list of words and ingredients.
Ingredients such as willow bark and CBD are listed there, that are not permitted and are in a, in a feed supplement and are considered medicinal by presentation or function. Avoidance of medicinal claims in marketing material and our labels is a legality, but many of the references in this webinar will give justification to this to their use, and they are likely to be medicinal by trial design, so please just bear that in mind as we go through this. So today we're going to focus on digestive and joint care supplements.
So based on sales figures and queries through our nutrition helpline, I would suggest that these are the top two categories and areas that we we focus on often. There are also areas that nutrition can complement and support your veterinary treatment really nicely, and notice I say the word complement, not alternative to treatment. So let's let's explore the key ingredients in digestive supplements more closely and then we'll move on to joint supplements briefly at the end.
So gut health, first the basics, always ensure that the basal diets correct first based on workload and stage of life. And then you can start to think about supplements. So forage and fibre are going to be key, and then you want to ensure that your daily nutrient requirements are met, ensuring that essential vitamins, minerals, energy, and energy and protein are being met.
Once this is sorted, you can look at supplements to provide additional support when required. For example, travel, stress, illness, including your antibiotic therapy, forage or routine change. So why is gut health so important?
The importance of the microbiome has been known for a while, but not well understood. And this paper is just the tip of the iceberg. It highlights that the microbiome is not just key for health but also performance.
This was a longitudinal cohort study of 52 thoroughbred foals bred for racing from birth to 33 years old. Faecal bacterial community structure was characterised at 9 time points in the first year, and they tracked respiratory, gastrointestinal, orthopaedic, and soft tissue health events from birth until 3 years old, as well as performance data. Interestingly, they identified a critical early life window and showed that gut bacterial community structure in the first month of life predicted the risk of disease and performance up to 3 years old.
Specifically, the 1st 28 days were identified as risk factors for respiratory disease, and there was some evidence for 14 to 60 days for orthopaedic soft tissue and gastrointestinal events. A lower diversity in the first month of life increased the risk of respiratory disease and orthopaedic and soft tissue injuries. They also identified the impact antibiotics had in the first month of life, which led to a significantly lower faecal bacterial diversity, and this impacted on later health and performance.
And this just highlighted another reason for judicious use of antimicrobials. Within the study, they started to identify bacterial families that were significantly associated with illness and injury in later life, as well as bacterial families that were significantly and positively associated with the performance outcomes. It's certainly an interesting area for more research.
So as the previous paper highlighted the critical window in the first month of life, this is a good place to go next. This paper looked at the effect of supplementing beta glucans and probiotics from acromyces cerevisia yeast in late gestation mares. 21 pregnant mares were divided into three groups the control group, probiotic, and beta glucans, and they were supplemented from day 300 of gestation until birth.
The probiotic fed was the live yeast Saroyces cereviser, which is currently the only authorised probiotic for equine use in the UK and the EU. The USA do have other probiotics available to them, both from yeast and bacterial sources. The probiotic group found an improved serum IgG in foals at 12 hours old.
This has previously been looked at by our Ayad Atal in 2017, who looked at 40 Arabian mares and barbed mares. They were fed acroyce cerevissier and they also found similar effects on IgG. The beta glucons group were fed beta glucans from a yeast cell wool source at 0.35 gramme orally.
Beta glucans led to increased total IgG in the clostrum. This improved the clostrum quality, but it's worth noting that it did not reflect significantly in the serum IgG of their foals. There's a wealth of research in a range of species to support the benefits of beta glucans for the immune system, which we'll continue to explore now.
So this paper demonstrates the benefits of supplementing beta glucans, again from a yeast source and focuses on the immune system benefits. 18 thoroughbreds were fed for 28 days in 3 groups, 125 milligrammes versus 2 grammes versus a control group. And they showed the improvement of the innate immune parameters and suggested a benefit of feeding prior to stressful events, so training, transportation, competition and weaning, for example, may be useful.
So published last year, the paper on the left is a nice review for any of you wishing to do a deep dive, deeper dive into beta glucans. So beta glucans can be sourced from yeast, plants, particularly cereals, including oats, certain seaweeds and fungi, but they differ in structure and molecular weight depending on their origin. And the, the different origins may impact on their solubility, receptor binding and immunomodulatory properties.
Cereals and yeast are commonly used and as frequent components of the equine diet can be considered safe. This review focuses on the evidence for beta glucans to support the immune system, antioxidant benefits, and gastric health. So in the real world, when would you consider supplementing beta glucans?
There are a range of reasons to supplement with beta glucans, including immune support, mares and foals as previously discussed, during times of stress and for gastrointestinal support, so specifically dysbiosis and equine gastric ulcer syndrome. Let's move on to gastric ulcers next. So probably the most recent development in the equine gastric supplement market is the blend of HA and beta glucans.
In 2017, Nathan Slovis published the paper on the right of the screen, a blend of high molecular weight, hyaluronic acid and beta glucans from a schisophyllin fungal source of beta glucans. 10 horses with gastric ulceration were fed the blend of HA and beta glucans for 30 days, at 240 to 480 milligrammes HA and 60 to 120 milligrammes of beta glucans total daily. So they were fed once or twice a day depending on, .
Depending on the the researcher's decision. Although the lack of control group is recognised by the authors, the horses remained in training and normal stress and or activity levels were not altered. So it makes it a really useful real world paper.
The headline figure is 90% of treated horses showed complete resolution and or improvement in ulcerative areas, increased appetite, weight gain, and positive behavioural changes. The more recent paper on the left from Andrews al 2025, they also fed HA and beta glucans again from the schisophyllin source to the 12 stall confined thoroughbreds. Over a 35 day period, they found improvements in non-glandular stomach health.
Interestingly, there was no significant alteration in gastric fluid pH between the groups, confirming that acid suppression is not the mode of action, rather mucosal support and immune modulation. And this paper reinforced the need for a multimodal approach to the management of your ulcer cases, of which nutrition can play an important role. So what are the proposed modes of action for HA and beta glucans?
High molecular HA is thought to protect the gastric mucosa against injury with reduction of ulcerative areas in the gastric wall and reduction or inhibition of edoema. It also stimulates prostaglandin expression. There's also thought to be a coating effect.
Beta glucans as non-starch polysaccharides. From cereals, fungi or yeast as we mentioned, have structural difference which underlie their different physiological effects. The fermentable soluble fibres versus the innate immune receptor ligands.
So beta glucans are thought to activate the immune response as biological defence modulators. So the way supplements can support gastric health, supporting gut pH and helping to regulate acid production. They can coat and have soothing effects, they can support the microbiome, they can support the immune system, and also there's a stress management component.
Reminder that supplements are to complement treatment and go alongside other management changes and obviously some of that will be diet and and feeding, not just supplements. So some of these areas we've already discussed with HAM beta glucan specifically, so let's just cover a few other ingredients with some published equine work. This recent review paper has a nice summary of some of the key ingredients that are commonly found in gastric supplements, including polyunsaturated fatty acids, which includes corn oil, which has obviously dominated discussions for a long time, in part due to the ease of availability in the States.
But omega 3 fatty acids in general warrant consideration, but I feel that's a whole another topic for another day. There's pectinlein, licorice, sea buckthorn, aloe vera, magnesium and calcium, probiotics, the sacromosa cerevisa yeast, HA and beta glucans mentioned here. My take home from this is that a multimodal approach is likely to give the best results.
Liquorice, so many of us will instantly think of the sweets, but it's actually the root we're looking at. This study looked at the effects of licorice on 12 mini donkeys with glandular ulcers induced by phenyle buttasone. They were divided into three groups, a placebo group, which was given water, a phenyle buttasone, and then a phenyle butasone and licorice root, root group.
Liquorice root extract reduced the severity of glandular disease caused by bute. Again, it was a small study size, but it's an interesting finding and supports the traditional use of licorice that has been used for over 4000 years. Gut pH is another source, another focus of gastric supplementation.
Commonly this will be from calcium and magnesium, but there are different sources of these ingredients, so does the source matter? Well, yes, to an extent it does, but I think it is most important in your clinical cases undergoing treatment with omeprazole. As, as shown by this paper by Joe Pagan Natal, omeprazole reduces calcium digestibility.
In this study, omeprazole led to calcium digestibility being reduced from 52% to 41%, with limestone or calcium carbonate, compared to myrl or a marine algal source. The marine algal source was 55 to 46.5%.
Merl is also known as marine algal or acid buff, is one of the more commonly known trade names for those farm vets among you. So I appreciate. The the difference between the marine algal, the Merl source versus the calcium carbonate limestone source, it is a marginal gain, but my preference would be to look for a Merl source rather than a calcium carbonate in a clinical case.
So let's move on to biotics, prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics. These are three key ingredients to support digestive health, but let's explore what they are and what the differences are. So on the screen there's, there's a definition for each, so let's work through them.
Ultimately, all three of the biotics will confer benefits on the host health. Prebiotics are non-enzymatically digestible carbohydrates, commonly fructo oligosaccharide or hoss, Mananoligosaccharizide abbreviated to moss or inulin. They're usually plant-based, coming from something like beetle chicory and equine feed.
Prebiotics are substrates that are selectively utilised by the gut microbiome, often considered as the fuel for the beneficial microbes. They have a range of mode of actions, including feeding beneficial microbes to produce short chain fatty acids, immune support, pathogen binding, but there are a range of forms and sources on the market which all have slightly different modes of action. Probiotics, these are the live microorganisms that confer a health benefit.
They can also be considered factories. They utilise prebiotics, fibre, and fodmap, or fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyoles to make metabolites. When looking at a label, the key is the probiotic units will be in colony forming units or CFUs to indicate that it's live.
Probiotics can be yeast-based or bacterium-based, but as already mentioned, in the UK and the EU we can only use Cyroy's serumvicaer due to legislation. There is support for the yeast-based approach, but the bacterium-based approach has some controversy in the literature, and there are conflicting reports about their efficacy. Modes of action for probiotics, so by taking out space and nutrients, they compete with pathogens and make it hard for them to colonise.
They also have an immunomodulatory effect and produce a metabolites such as short chain fatty acids, as well as supporting nutrient digestion, particularly fibre and crude protein. The probiotics we use in our supplements will have proven recovery rates, and yeast strains that are permitted will be EFSA, European Food Safety Authority approved, so they need to be safe and viable. Postbiotics, so these are the latest buzzwords and the, the newest of the biotics, only being defined in 2021.
Postbiotics are a preparation of inanimate microorganisms and their metabolites, or to use the factory analogy, they would be the goods. One of the key points about the postbiotics is that they'll have a consistent metabolite outcome. This microbial fermentate, it's going to be composed of hundreds of bioactive compounds, including phytosterols, organic acids, antioxidants and polyphenols, nucleotides, peptides, proteins, vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, phospholipids, oligosaccharides, short chain fatty acids, acetate, propionite, and butyrate particularly, but also the residual cells and cell walls, which are going to include the manninoligosaccharides, moss, and beta glucans, which we've already mentioned.
So as you can see that sometimes the distinction between pre and probiotics isn't clear cut, and we'll come on to how the sort of the claims and how probiotics work shortly. So to use another analogy, moving away from the factory analogy, if you think of the equine gut as a beehive, prebiotics are the flowers, or more specifically the nectar, probiotics are the bees or the active workforce, and postbiotics are the honey. So they're the bioactive metabolites produced by microbial activity, even if they're no longer live and are inanimate.
And as we said, the definition, there is some blurring between the definition of pre and postbiotics, it's not as black and white as this slide makes out. For example, an ingredient may be categorised as a prebiotic, but functionally it may work as a postbiotic. So there are some key areas of postbiotic research in the horse, gut health, immune function, stress management and recovery, and joint support.
It'll be interesting to see where the research goes next. Post-biotic in humans have been discussing prevention and management of obesity, which obviously is such an important issue in the equine world. It's an exciting area of research.
But it's not yet extended into equine research. So in the humans, they propose that postbiotics exert anti-obesity effects by increased energy expenditure, reduced dipogenesis, and a diphocyte differentiation, suppression of food intake, inhibition of lipid absorption. Regulation of lipid metabolism and regulation of gut dysbiosis.
I'll direct you to the Parker to 2023 paper for further information on that. As I said, we haven't got any information on that in, in the horse. I just thought it was an interesting direction that the human research is going.
So let's go back to the the horse specific research. So, the first, the first point is to just consider his gut health. So this is a relatively old paper now, 2007, and Morgan Eal, they evaluated the effect of yeast culture supplementation on nutrient utilisation of Bermuda grass-based diets, which contained a varying foliage forage quality, and they were looking at them in mature horses, adult horses.
They found that supplementing with yeast culture, which is the postbiotic, improved nutrient digestibility when forage quality was compromised. They found an increased volatile fatty acid production, and they also found an improvement in intestinal villa characteristics. So longer, denser villa, a better barrier, more absorptive.
The more recent paper, Gander etal. 2023, looked at 20 quarter horses fed the Zacroyces serviscaA fermentation product. They underwent a transport stress model and found a more stable and diverse gut microbiome to those fed a postbiotic, and it also supported the beneficial species populations.
So the key take-home points for gut health are postbiotics can support stable and diverse microbiome. They can improve nutrient digestibility, especially when forage was poor. They increase volatile fatty acid production.
And they improved intestinal villa characteristics. The next area to consider in reference to postbiotics is immune support, stress management, and recovery. There's 5 papers referenced here looking at the benefits of postbiotics for immune support, stress management, and recovery.
The first papers look at stress, stress support, specifically exercise and travel. The Valegraal. 2021 paper looked at effects of the sacromyces servisA fermentation post postbiotic on systemic stress and inflammatory response in horses following prolonged exercise challenge.
Horses fed postbiotics had lower serum cortisol and SAA compared to the control. This suggested a faster and appropriate response and recovery from exercise. Gandertal looked at the effect of stress using an elevated head stress model and found that the postbiotic improved robustness of the equine micro of the equine microbiome.
There is obviously a clinical relevance here in horses undergoing prolonged transportation with this elevated head model. Tenterau looked at the effects of the postbiotic, again, the sacroycesareviaA fermentation products. The majority of the research is in the sacromycesarevicaA fermentation product.
In young horses, so this was 2 year old quarter horses in training, and found the addition of the postbiotic during stress challenge, again, a prolonged head elevation improved the mucosal immunity in these horses when compared to a control group. Higher IGA in nasopharyngeal flush samples in the group receiving the postbiotic may have helped attenuate local inflammation. So the immunomodulatory effects have been, have been seen in these following papers.
Lucas and Natal looked at feed effects of feeding the postbiotic to a group of 2 year olds and compared their immune response post flu vaccination. This was a booster, not a naive population, and they compared it to a control group. Differences were seen in the leukocyte composition and reticulocyte fractions after vaccination.
This suggested that the postbiotic led to a modulated early immune response after vaccination and may also affect memory responses. The 2024 paper looked at effects of the postbiotic in warm blood foals for the 1st 30 days of life and the effect on foal heat, diarrhoea, and the impact of vaccination at 6 to 9 months of age. Although there was no statistical significant effect on diarrhoea duration or severity, there was a difference in early immune response to the initial vaccination at 6 to 9 months old, showing the long lasting effect.
Work has also been done in older horses with the Norton Natal paper looking at the effects of the postbiotic in senior horses when challenged when an influenza vaccine, and they've concluded that dietary yroyces servisa fermentation product may modulate pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokine gene expression. Recently research on postbiotics in the horse has moved into the realm of joint health. Two papers have looked at young quarter horses with the treatment group being supplemented with the sacromyces cerevicaer fermentation product.
Radiocarpal joints were injected with LPS and measurements taken. The contralateral joint was injected with sterile lactated ringer solution as a control. Synovial prostaglandin was overall lower in horses supplemented with the postbiotic compared to the control, and prostaglandin was significantly lower 6 hours post injection in horses supplemented with the postbiotic than the control group.
The postbiotic may help to ameliorate inflammatory cytokines and chemokines following an acute intraarticular insult. There were also differences noted in intra-articular cartilage synthesis and degradation. It will be interesting to see where this research continues.
So just to summarise, here are some practical uses for the tribiotics. I think it's worth mentioning that each of the biotics pre-pro and postbiotic can be used as a standalone ingredient, but there appears to be some synergism when the biotics are fed together. So clinical cases and scenarios where you may want to, where you may want to consider some of the tribiotics to feed and supplement, so times of digestive disturbance, stress or illness.
Support for competition or performance horses, especially if they're travelling frequently or long distance, moving yards, or disruption in a routine, antibiotic therapy. Pregnant mares and foals, suboptimal diet or feed management practises, despite horse owners' best efforts, we know there are sometimes compromises, so they can be a useful adjunct to support them through a tricky time. So let's move on to joints.
This again, huge area and not one I can do justice to in the next few minutes, but it's one of the possibly the most common supplements horse owners will ask you for, and it would be remiss to omit it totally today. The list of ingredients on this slide show the most common ones seen and researched. When talking to owners, I tend to talk about supporting joint health, so looking at the chondroprotective ingredients versus joint comfort, the ingredients that focus on anti-inflammatory support and antioxidants, and they're most likely to be useful in your horses with wear and tear on your clinical lameness cases.
Much of the published research in horses is not a sing in on a single ingredient, rather a blend or a commercial formulation. So it supports my belief that you see the best results when using a multimodal approach with a blend of ingredients at effective levels. I'm sure within your, within your case populations and practises, you will have debated glucosamine, chondroitin, and HA over the years.
So I just want to focus on two ingredients today that you may or may not be familiar with, and I think they're particularly helpful in supporting your lameness cases. So I'm going to talk about Boswellia and ASU. So Boswellia resin, this is from the tree found in Africa and Asia.
It's not new. Think back to the tale of the three wise men gifting gold, frankincense and myrrh. Well, frankincense is just another name for the resin from the Boswellia trees.
The most common form used is Boswellia serrata. Some supplements use whole Boswellia resin, where some use extracts, for example, a concentrated kbar extract. One of the key Boswellic acids found in, found in the Boswellia.
So a word of caution, not all Boswellia supplements are equal, and it can be very difficult for horse owners to compare based on the label. And also in horses, we don't yet have the research published comparing akbar extracts versus whole resins, so I think it can be difficult to know, but anecdotally, horses seem to do well on both. The primary claim on most Boswellia supplements is joint and muscle comfort, so it really is ideal to support OA and wear and tear.
But the research in humans is broadening much wider than just musculoskeletal comfort, to respiratory health, tumours, IBS, diarrhoea, ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. When you look at the mode of action, it does make sense, anti-inflammatory by inhibiting 5-life oxygenase and its antioxidant effects. So on the screen is a list of references, and Boswellian human arthritis is fairly well established and scientifically recognised to be effective in managing OA symptoms.
The early studies were in human knee osteoarthritis, and they showed good anti-inflammatory, anti-arthritic and analgesic activity of the Boswellia serrata extract. There was another human study that compared Boswellia with valediccoxib, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, and found a good response to Boswellia. Research has also been performed in dogs and found Boswellia to be safe and also provides symptomatic relief to OA disease, and the study in dogs was specifically looking at inflammatory joint and spinal disease.
Unfortunately, there's still limited equine equine studies and we are extrapolating much of this from human and other species or in vitro work. So with those that are available to us, they often include multiple ingredients. The two studies sort of that do include Boswellia are the Horohoff 2012, where they looked at the effect of exercise and nutritional supplementation on pro-inflammatory cytokine expression in young racehorses during training.
They concluded that this study provided novel evidence of nutritional supplementation reducing post-exercise inflammation. Their supplement was a blend of Boswellia, curcumin, or turmeric, and coenzyme Q10. Just a note, coenzyme Q10's not a permitted feed ingredient here in the UK, so we often look for an alternative antioxidant, with melon pulp being a good alternative as a source of the primary antioxidant superoxide dismutase.
So the Bergheli, more recent 2023 paper supplemented 16 show jumpers with Boswellia, verbascumthapsis, and again, turmeric, and looked at the effects of serum proteome, antioxidant status, and anti-inflammatory gene expression. The conclusion was that this may be a useful phytotherapy to reduce inflammation and innate immunity activation triggered by intense exercise in horses, in sports horses. This is a good point just to mention sustainability with our vet mantra of do no harm.
So it's not just sustainability is not just packaging, it also extends to the sourcing of ingredients. Is the ingredient sustainable and does it impact on its ecosystem? While we're talking about Boswellia, this is a good point to just use the Boswellia as an example of sustainability, so it's routinely harvested from the wild, and there is a risk of overharvesting.
This has the potential to impact on a critically endangered Arabian leopard, so it's really important that all ingredients are sourced sustainably and it's from a traceable source. Another example commonly found in joint supplements is collagen. Traditionally, shark cartilage was used, which obviously is not ethical or sustainable as an endangered species.
There is an alternative, or there are alternatives I should say, one example being the co-product from the pantagaseous fish, which can be sourced sustainably. It's a circular model and gives waste product, or as we like to call them co-products, value. So the final ingredient to talk about today is ASU or avocado soybean unsaponifiable.
I've included this as an ingredient as I get asked about it quite a bit, what is it and what does it do? So ASU is a concentrated mixture of bioactive plant compounds extracted from avocado oil and soybean oil. The balance of avocado to soybean is typically a 1:2 ratio.
The active components include phytosterols, fat soluble vitamins, including Tocoros along with keratinoids. Work in equine tendon derived cells have shown that ASU in combination with glucosamine and chondroitin sulphate reduced interleukin 1 beta, induced COX-2 gene expression and prostaglandin production. So they concluded that the combination may may attenuate detrimental inflammation and tandems.
Another equine study used ASU over a period of 70 days in horses with experimentally induced osteoarthritis. They demonstrated a reduction in articular cartilage erosion score and reduction in synovial membrane haemorrhage. The effect of ASU on chondrocytes from equine articular cartilage when fed alone or in conjunction with alpha lipoic acid have also been investigated.
Both ingredients digress suppressed prostaglandin production with the greatest effect seen when combined. Back to the point of a blend of ingredients is more likely to. Do you get the results you want.
So the focus of ASU on when to use it is supporting joint health, including tendon health in that. And when you're looking for anti-inflammatory support, so for example, recovery from an injury or older horses with wear and tear, this is an ideal ingredient to add into your multimodal approach. So my take home message is for today, targeted nutrition will get the best results, pick the right supplement for the right case.
Ensure your basal nutrition is sufficient before you reach for the supplements. Remember, supplements and good nutrition are just part of the jigsaw for health and wellbeing, and they can complement veterinary treatment nicely, so don't forget them. Choose your supplements wisely, hopefully I've given you a couple of tools to, to do this, one of them being looking for something like the Betaox logo or other recognised accreditations depending on locality.
Look for transparency with ingredients you want to know exactly what you are feeding or recommending to your clients, and if it doesn't say, challenge the company that make it. If you have any if you need any nutrition advice, please do contact our technical team, we're more than happy to help or the just a quick plug for the new Beta NFAR register of nutritionists, that's another it's going to be another useful resource for finding nutritionists. So I appreciate there was a lot of content in this webinar today, so please do contact us if you'd like the list of references, and we're more than happy to answer questions either now in the Q&A or later via email.
So thank you all for listening and Deborah and Catherine have just joined me again. So back for questions. Thank you Catherine, that was very insightful and a lot to digest.
So we have a couple of questions to run through and just conscious of time, if we aren't able to answer everybody's questions, please feel free to just drop us an email in particular. Catherine's address is up on the screen now. So very quickly, yes, we will be giving out copies of the presentations and a list of references will be sent out following.
The conclusion of today's webinar, if I go on to some of the more digestive related questions first, and if we look at, Question around safety, and this is in particular reference to are probiotics safe to use in all categories, in particular folds, so Deborah, would you be so kind as to give us some thoughts on that please? Yeah, thank you, Catherine. Well, as, as Catherine's mentioned, the health of the microbiome in foals is significant for health and performance in later life.
So if the microbiome is disrupted, tribiotics may well be helpful as part of your treatment protocol, and we do indeed consider them safe to use based on the evidence and safety regulations and authorisations that, were mentioned, in today's talk, for the yeast-based, probiotics, which, as Catherine emphasised a couple of times, are the only ones, Saroyce cerevicie that are licenced and authorised in the EU and the UK. Some of the controversy that you may have read in various papers about the safety and efficacy of the bacterium-based probiotics, are not permitted in the EU and the UK. So the probiotics that we use have got proof.
And recovery rates, and we use yeast strains that are permitted and that are EFSA, European Food and Safety Authority approved, which shows that they are both safe and viable. So, so yes, we think they are safe in young foals and can be beneficial, as Catherine's mentioned. Perfect, thank you, thank you very much for that, Deborah.
Another, another question around the, the biotics group and, and the probiotic lines. We have a question as to whether the CFU level is always consistent or what, or, or more so why does it vary, and I'll take this one. It takes CFU levels, whether you're looking at feeds or or supplements.
I, I've always express CFU per kilogramme. And it can be an area of confusion because depending on the strain of yeast that is being used within that feed or supplement, the targeted amount of CFU per day is different. And that is something that is driven by EFSA.
So the target intake for one marketed brand or particular strain of yeast will be different to the next. There's probably 3 or 4 in the UK that are most commonly used. If you're not sure, if you look at the the feed or the the label on a pots or a pouch, you'll be able to see the EU additive code and that will tell you which particular strain of yeast it is, and then it's possible to work out what the target CFU per day is.
It's a little bit of a math challenge, and if anybody would like help with that subject, again, please feel free to contact us. We're it's a, it's a question we get on a quite a regular basis, so. Anymore, please get in touch.
Slightly stepping away from the digestive category, and this is OK because it's an open forum. I have a question about a coming back to coenzyme Q10. I'm wondering, you can sometimes see it online and acquire it, but it doesn't seem to be very available in the UK.
So Catherine T, you did mention that earlier. Why is this not accessible, I guess is the question, but what would, what would you recommend as a substitution when you can't get hold of it? So yeah, I think it's coenzyme Q10, it seems to come up a lot in the myopathy papers, particularly coming out of sort of Stephanie Wahlberg's work and it's there as an antioxidant and the reason we can't get it here in the UK is because it's not a permitted feed ingredient in the EU and EU and UK.
So there's a register and catalogue of feed ingredients and additives, there's various lists that basically. The ingredients, feed ingredients have to be on those. There is differences between the EU and UK.
There is some overlap, but obviously with Brexit, I hate to mention that. There there's been some divergence there, so if it's not on that list, you can't use it. And unlike veterinary medicines where we have the luxury of using the cascade, if we haven't got something available to us that's licenced, we can't do that with feed ingredients.
So, so you do have to look at alternatives, but I think. Reading the research, I think it is there. And being used in myopathies for its antioxidant benefits, and we do have a lot of other antioxidants available to us.
So, one of the ones we tend to, we've effect, not substituted, they're, they're doing slightly different things but ending up with the same antioxidant effect. We are, we use melon pulp as a source of superoxide disintase, that primary antioxidant, and I think that's a really nice alternative here in the UK to consider. And again there is some published research if anyone wants the references for those, just message us and we're happy to, direct you in the right, in the right way.
Thank you very much. So, a question, potentially myopathies as well, and this relates to vitamin E. How many IUs do you need?
Is it all about the numbers and, and sort of vitamin E sourcing? So, Deborah, could I throw that one your way? Yes, thank you.
There's vitamin is a, a, an interesting subject at the moment. There's really not any definitive requirement data. If you look in the published literature, requirement data will range between from the typical.
Or 500 kg horse will range between 1000 or 1200 IUs or even down as low as 800 in some of the older texts, right up to what we think may be beneficial therapeutic levels going up between 50 and 8000 IUs. And we've then got the question of the source of the vitamin E to consider. Are we looking at the synthetic forms of vitamin E, where we've got 8 different isomers of the DL alpha tocofero.
Now you may think that synthetic means that it's not as good as the alternative source, the natural source, but actually we've been using synthetic vitamin E for many decades now, very successfully, and you'll find most. Equine feeds and supplements will use, a form of synthetic vitamin E successfully. However, when you've got clinical cases when more significant antioxidant support may be required, there is some research showing that the natural form of vitamin E, which is the D alpha tocoferal, often referenced with RRR, R for Romeo.
So natural R RR vitamin E, it is the way that it's usually described, and the research has shown that this is more bioavailable. So when you're looking at clinical cases where you want to elevate significantly, perhaps, compromised livers or myopathies has been mentioned, then you may opt to use a form that, that opt to use the natural form, perhaps as a combination with the synthetic form. So we, in, in our product range we use both types.
In, in the veterinary range we've got products that contain the natural vitamin E, as we have in our main range, but we also use synthetic vitamin E when it's appropriate. Thank you, thank you very much. Some slightly, slightly different questions that way.
I'm just conscious of time and wanting to make sure everybody gets to have their lunch and that they have enjoyed today's session. So I'd just like to say thank you very much to everybody who's listened live and will be listening later. The CPDCE points, they will be available within 24 hours after this presentation closes.
And if you have got further questions that you think of, please do get in touch. We are always very happy to chat anything nutritional with you. So thank you again to Catherine for speaking and for, for Deborah for helping answering all of our questions today.
Yes, thank you very much, everyone. Have a good day. Thank you for joining.
