The key to managing laminitis is by controlling non-structural carbohydrates (NSC) in their diet. But what are they and how does this relate to grazing for laminitic horses? Non-structural carbohydrates are the carbohydrates the plant produces during the process of photosynthesis. During photosynthesis, a plant takes sunlight for energy and uses water and carbon dioxide to create carbohydrates like starch, sugars and fructan.
NSC production starts when the sun comes up and finishes for the day when the sun goes down again. So during sunlight hours, a plant will produce NSC. Then overnight, the plant burns some of this accumulated NSC to survive and grow. They essentially make their own food during the day, and then ‘eat’ some of this food overnight to stay alive and grow.
Which means, NSC content will be lowest in the very early morning, just before the sun comes up. And they will be highest late in the afternoon, just as the sun goes down and into the early evening.
If you have a horse that is prone to laminitis, you should allow grazing only in the VERY early hours of the morning. And if the pasture may become unsafe, you should have them off pasture within 2 hours of sunrise.
BE WARNED however, that even in the very early morning, some pastures will still be too high in NSC to be safe. Spring is a particularly risky time for this to occur as the days are long enough for high NSC accumulation, but the nights are cold enough to slow plant metabolism and growth down so much that they don’t burn up much NSC overnight.
So early morning grazing is sometimes, but not always safe!
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Grazing muzzles are useful for reducing your horse’s pasture intake. They can be used for easy-keepers when you are trying to reduce energy levels within the diet. Or when your horse suffers from a health condition which requires a reduction of non-structural carbohydrates (starch + sugar) in their diet. Grazing muzzles have gained popularity with many horse owners as they allow their horse to socialise, exercise and be continually stimulated through grazing.
Studies have shown grazing muzzles can reduce forage intake by as much as 80%. There are many factors which affect intake including acclimatization to the muzzle, pasture height and type of muzzle used and your individual horse’s tenacity when it comes to getting grass to poke through the hole.
To enter pasture intake in FeedXL when your horse is wearing a grazing muzzle, subtract up to 80% from the time your horse spends grazing. For example, if your horse is allowed to graze muzzled for 15 hours and is dry-lotted the remainder of the time, you might enter ‘3 hours’ as the amount of time your horse ‘grazes’ into FeedXL (80% of 15 is 12 hours; 15 x 0.8 = 12 hours: 15 – 12 = 3 hours of ‘grazing time’.
Observe your horse grazing pasture while muzzled and watching his body condition over time. This will allow you to get a better estimate of actual intake by your horse. You may find that reducing the ‘time’ grazing in FeedXL by 80% is too much, so adjust it as you see fit.
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Dietary iron is thought by some to contribute to the incidence of laminitis in horses, with serum ferritin starting to be used as the measure of iron status.
It is unclear if this is the case, but in reading human literature, it seems the relationship between serum ferritin and inflammation is a bit of a case of chicken or the egg. Lots of information shows serum ferritin is elevated in humans with inflammatory disease and/or metabolic syndrome, but it is not clear what happened first; did serum ferritin rise and cause inflammation, or did inflammation and cell damage occur and cause elevated serum ferritin?
A good place to start is with a review on serum ferritin. This article tells us that serum ferritin is actually a little protein ball, with a hollow centre where it keeps iron. Depending on how much iron is available in the body, the amount of iron inside the ferritin can vary a lot.
When serum ferritin is measured, it is the protein that is being measured, not the iron. So a serum ferritin measure tells you how many little protein balls are there but not how much iron they actually contain.
The other interesting thing to note is that ferritin is made within cells and is not made in the blood. So it seems that for ferritin to get into the blood it has to come out of the body’s cells (with very limited evidence if any, according to these authors, of any regulated ferritin secretion mechanism in mammals). This leads to the hypothesis that the elevated serum ferritin seen during inflammation is due to leakage from damaged cells into the blood.
The paper goes on to talk about the relationship between serum ferritin and liver iron stores, which are considered the gold standard for assessing body iron stores. While serum ferritin is usually related to liver iron in ‘normal humans’ that don’t have inflammatory disease, serum ferritin can both under and over-estimate liver iron stores where some form of inflammatory disease is at play.
Meaning it is not necessarily a good indicator of overall iron status. These authors suggest serum (‘soluble’) transferrin receptor (sTfR) as being much more useful.
The simple takeaway is that serum ferritin is not necessarily an indicator of iron overload from high dietary iron and may instead be an indicator of inflammation. Maybe the chicken came first… or was it the egg??
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Teff Hay seems to be gaining popularity as a hay option for many horse owners and because it is sold as a low starch low sugar hay it is starting to be recommended in place of Rhodes Grass Hay.
BUT, if you are lucky enough to have access to Rhodes Grass Hay, here are some things to think about before considering a swap:
1. Rhodes Grass Hay is low in oxalate, containing approximately 2.5 to 3 g/kg of oxalate.
Teff Hay is moderate to high in oxalate at 10 to 12 g/kg. This means Teff needs careful supplementation of calcium, phosphorus and magnesium to prevent it from causing Bighead Disease. With Rhodes being so low in oxalate Bighead is not an issue (though you do still need to make sure you correctly balance the diet for minerals and vitamins as forages rarely contain enough to meet a horse’s requirement).
2. Rhodes Grass Hay is more reliable and consistent when it comes to the low starch, low sugar characteristic.
From the analyses we have seen coming through here at FeedXL, Teff can be high in starch, with one analysis sent through showing an as-fed starch content of 7.1% and total NSC of 13.7% which, for a laminitic horse, is going to be too high. While soaking would more than likely bring this non-structural carbohydrate (NSC) level back down to safe levels it makes for much more time-consuming feeding… so if you have access to Rhodes Grass it would be much easier to use this.
3. Teff Hay causes some odd behavioural issues in some horses and this is normally associated with an alkaline fecal pH.
We have no way of explaining this, and it doesn’t happen with all horses on Teff so I don’t know if all Teff Hay is the same or if there is a certain variety that causes this issue.
So, while Teff gives people in cooler climates a low NSC option which is welcome, it is not yet well understood and not without its issues. If I had a choice between Teff and Rhodes I would go with Rhodes Hay every time.
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Many people wonder about how high sugar or high NSC forages affect their horse’s weight, so this is a question we are often asked. Our standard response has always been ‘well, it depends on the calorie content of the forage’, which then begs the question about the relationship between forage NSC and digestible energy content.
What exactly is the relationship between high sugar forages, digestible energy, and horse weight?
In looking at 13 pasture samples from one farm, it seems the higher the NSC content, the higher the digestible energy (calorie) content. The pastures shown here were all sampled between 11 am and 2 pm on the same day. They were all dried at the same time and all were analyzed by Equi-Analytical.
A graph of Digestible Energy (calorie) value versus pasture non-structural carbohydrate (NSC = starch + water soluble carbohydrates) content is pretty clear for this particular set of pastures; as NSC increases so does digestible energy… which makes very logical sense given the NSC is a source of calories so the more NSC, the more calories.
So perhaps the answer should be ‘yes, high NSC forages will make your horses fatter faster than low NSC forages!’. And therefore yes, it makes sense to feed a low NSC forage when you are trying to achieve weight loss or avoid weight gain in your easy keepers.
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Feeding grain free diets has grown in popularity in the last 10 years and there are certainly many benefits. BUT, need it always be the way to go? The answer is, it depends, but often no.
Horses with conditions like laminitis, PSSM tying up, PPID/Cushing’s, equine metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance etc MUST be fed a low sugar, low starch (or low non-structural carbohydrate; NSC) diet. Usually, to achieve low enough starch and sugar levels, these diets need to be grain free. One of the things FeedXL is great for is to help you sort out which feeds, forages and supplements are safe (low in starch and sugars; NSC) or not safe to feed horses with these conditions.
But for horses that don’t need low sugar, low starch diets to control diseases, as long as grain is FED SAFELY, grains can form a very valuable part of a ration! They are economical compared to high energy fibres like beet pulp (which are expensive in comparison), they provide a source of glucose that horses in heavy work can use to readily replenish muscle glycogen supplies, and they are palatable… horses love grains, so keeping horses in hard work eating on grain based feeds tends to be relatively simple provided the recipe is good!
So, as long as grains are well cooked (with the exception of oats which can be fed uncooked) and as long as you feed them in small meals (no more than 0.5 kg/100 kg BW, 0.5 lb/100 lb BW) they can form a very useful part of a horse’s diet. These are HUGE ‘as long as’ statements too… feed grains in the wrong way and things WILL go horribly wrong. But that is another story for another day.
The moral of this story is don’t fall into the trap of one-size-fits-all when it comes to grain free.
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Over the last few years questions about teff (Eragrostis tef) hay and its suitability for laminitic horses have started to come up and it appears production of teff hay and therefore availability is on the rise. Here is a very mini review of the published research on teff hay in horses that we can find:
Recent Research on Teff Hay for Horses
Staniar et al 2010
These authors report non-structural carbohydrate (NSC) contents for teff of 5.4% in the ‘boot’ stage and 8.4% in the ‘late heading stage’ of plant maturity. Both really low NSC levels and well below the 10 – 12% threshold considered safe for laminitic horses. Variation between samples was also minimal which is also our experience with other C4 Type grasses like Rhodes for example.
Horses in this study ate 1.5% to 1.8% of their bodyweight in teff hay, with the lower intakes being on the more mature hay. Again, this is a good thing as horses on restricted diets are unlikely to eat this hay as fast as more palatable hays like alfalfa, so they should eat for longer periods of time for lower calorie intake.
McCown et al 2012
Report that when fed to horses unaccustomed to teff and given a choice of either teff and alfalfa or teff and timothy, their intake of teff is lower than their intake of alfalfa (no surprises there) and timothy. BUT, when given access to only teff, intake was about the same as timothy hay. So they don’t relish teff hay, but truly, this is a good thing as they are less likely to overeat it!
Askins et al 2017
These authors report that horses given free access to teff hay consumed 1.5% of their bodyweight per day which equated to 86% of maintenance calorie requirements. So the finding of lower intake on teff continues … hooray for teff!
This study also reports that resting glucose and insulin levels did not change over 10 days while the horses were fed teff. To keep this in context however, ryegrass hay (which can be very high in NSC) was fed as the control hay in this study and glucose and insulin levels also remained the same on this hay. Unfortunately, the NSC content of the hays was not reported (yet!).
DeBoer et al 2017
In another recent study, these authors report that cool season (C3) perennial grasses (in this case orchardgrass, also known as cocksfoot and Kentucky bluegrass) had a significantly higher NSC content than teff pasture in summer and fall/autumn, however actual NSC content was not reported (this is just an abstract, hopefully the data will be fully published in future).
This research also looked at differences in plasma glucose levels in horses grazing either alfalfa, cool season (C3) grasses or teff and found that differences were minimal. However, we know that insulin resistant horses can maintain normal glucose levels, they just need a lot more insulin to achieve this. So just because differences in glucose levels were not apparent doesn’t mean there would not have been differences in insulin levels. These authors report that insulin levels will be reported in future research, so hopefully it is just a case of ‘watch this space’.
Summary
All in all, from the research available, teff appears to be suitable for laminitic horses and any other horses who need either a calorie restricted and/or NSC restricted diet. If you are going to feed teff hay, though be sure to use FeedXL to balance the diet.
Teff, being a subtropical/warm season/C4 type grass does contain oxalate which will reduce calcium absorption by your horse and may lead to calcium deficiency if you don’t correctly balance the diets calcium to oxalate ratio (FeedXL will make sure you do this!). Teff, like almost all forages will also be low in trace-minerals and doesn’t contain great quality protein… so you will have a few gaps to fill. Of course, testing your specific hay and uploading this to FeedXL will give you the best results in balancing your horse’s diet!
Finally, alfalfa/lucerne hay makes a great forage to feed alongside teff. Alfalfa is similarly low in NSC, but unlike teff is rich in quality protein and high in calcium to help offset the calcium binding tendency of the teff. They complement each other nicely.
If you need a low NSC forage, teff gets the thumbs up from us!
Askins M.J., Palkovic A.G., Leppo K.A., Jones G.C. & Gill J.C. Effect of feeding teff hay on dry matter intake, digestible energy intake and resting insulin/glucose concentration in horses. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science 52, 45.
DeBoer M.L., Hathaway M.R., Kuhle K.J., Weber P.S.D., Sheaffer C.C., Wells M.S., Mottet R.S. & Martinson K.L. Glucose response of horses grazing alfalfa, cool-season perennial grasses and teff across seasons. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science 52, 79.
McCown S., Brummer M., Hayes S., Olson G., Smith S.R., Jr. & Lawrence L. Acceptability of Teff Hay by Horses. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science 32, 327-31.
Staniar W.B., Bussard J.R., Repard N.M., Hall M.H. & Burk A.O. (2010) Voluntary intake and digestibility of teff hay fed to horses1. J Anim Sci 88, 3296-303.
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We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!
