ARTICLE LIBRARY

General Nutrition - All About Digestive Enhancers

• Contain live bacteria to flood the gut with beneficial species which can then stop the harmful species from becoming established through “competitive exclusion”.
• A good probiotic supplement should contain at least 5 and preferably 8 or more different species of good bacteria.
• Can be used as a shorter term strategy in response to an acute disruption to the microbial population, eg. after a course of antibiotics.  If the microbial population is likely to be compromised indefinitely, as with older horses, they may need to be used long term to counteract the problem.    

• Yeast is thought to provide the fibre-digesting bacteria with important nutrients, or co-factors, that stimulate their activity and may even bring the bacteria and the food particle together to make the digestion process more efficient.
• Yeast requires oxygen in order to live and, as the horse’s hind gut is largely anaerobic (free from oxygen), it needs to be supplied in the diet daily to be effective. 

• These are “non-digestible food ingredients that beneficially affect the host by stimulating the growth and/or activity of one or a limited number of bacteria in the colon”.
• The horse, or other host animal, cannot utilise the prebiotic but it does have an effect on the bacteria in the gut.
• Tend to be sugars called oligosaccharides, those most commonly used in horse feeds being fructo- and mannan- oligosaccharides, which have different modes of action.
• Mannan-oligosaccharides stop some harmful bacteria binding to the gut wall so they can’t reproduce or establish a population.  Some harmful species however remain unaffected.
• Fructo-oligosaccharides act as a food source for beneficial bacterial species so that they can flourish at the expense of the harmful ones.
  
  

• Underweight horses may have compromised gut bacterial populations; if they have been under nourished then so too have their gut bacteria.  If the bacterial population is unhealthy the horse may still not gain condition whatever he is fed.
• Horses that get excited or stressed when they compete or travel often pass frequent and loose droppings which pushes good bacteria out of the gut quicker than normal.  Digestive enhancers help promote healthy bacterial populations so the risk of weight loss, or “tucking up”, as a result is reduced or avoided.
• FOS prebiotics have worked well against diarrhoea in foals when used according to veterinary advice.
• Species of bacteria involved in the immune response decrease with age so on going use of prebiotics in older horses also help maintain overall, as well as gut, health.
• Sudden changes of diet due to illness or box rest can cause digestive upsets, especially if antibiotics have been administered.  Laminitis, for example, can result in a disruption of the bacterial population so, whilst digestive enhancers won’t cure the condition they can help restore the balance.