Equine Gastric Ulcer Syndrome (EGUS) is definitely “trending” at the moment and many horse owners are adapting their horses’ diets, whether they’ve been diagnosed or not. Jane Buchan from Baileys Horsefeeds has the following advice.

Horses who are stressy, spooky or don’t hold condition well, could be harbouring gastric ulcers but they can only be diagnosed by your vet using a gastroscope. Ideally, these should then be treated and your management and feeding regime adapted to reduce the risk of their recurrence.

One of the main features of an appropriate diet is to reduce the starch content because starch, from cereals, can make the stomach and digestive environment more acidic. As it happens, reducing and controlling dietary starch levels also helps in the management of other clinical conditions, like tying-up, which can have a number of causative factors and is also potentially performance-limiting. So how do you put together a reduced starch diet for your horse, especially if he has high calorie and nutrient requirements?

Forage First

Providing ad lib forage not only reduces stress levels by allowing the horse to do what comes naturally ie. chew, and the chewing produces saliva which has buffering (neutralising) effects on stomach acid. Fibre in the stomach can act as a physical barrier, helping to prevent acid splashing up on to the vulnerable stomach lining, and is also essential for the healthy functioning of the digestive system as a whole. Time out at grass is important for very similar reasons.

Maintaining Fibre Intake

For hard-working horses who have limited access to pasture and/or are not good hay/haylage eaters, providing alternative forages is important to encourage and increase fibre intake. Alfalfa chaffs, like Alfalfa Blend and Alfalfa Plus Oil, are ideal for providing digestible fibre and have natural acid-buffering properties, while soaked Speedi-Beet pulp or Fibre-Beet are also very useful. These can all be fed in separate buckets from the compound feed, in order to provide a selection and to encourage natural foraging behaviour.

Concentrate Feeding

BETA’s feed approval mark is designed to help horse owners identify which feeds are suitable for horses prone to gastric ulcers. This means that their starch and sugar contents are low enough that, when fed according to recommendations, the horse will receive less than 1g/100kg of bodyweight in starch and sugar per meal and less than 2g/100kg of bodyweight of starch and sugar per day, parameters which have been identified by specific research.

When looking at feed labels, “low starch” would probably be 10 – 12% and below, “reduced starch”, 12 – 22%, with typical competition mixes being around 30% starch. As with so many aspects of equine nutrition, it’s important to look at the whole diet rather than to focus only on one aspect or nutrient; this is when talking to an experienced nutritionist can prove invaluable.

Higher Calorie Requirements

When only a moderate reduction in starch intake is deemed necessary or for horses where some cereal intake is required for performance, All-Round Endurance Mix or Slow Release Condition & Competition Mix provide slow release calories, support work to the highest level and have reduced starch contents (22%) compared to other competition feeds.

There is now a number of fully balanced, low starch, high specification feeds, like Ease & Excel and Ease & Excel Cubes ( both just 8% starch), which are formulated to help promote and maintain condition and support performance, while still being low in starch. These are most appropriate when calories requirements are higher so are ideal for working and competing horses and those who need to gain condition.

Moderate Calorie Requirements

When calorie requirements are moderate, lower energy feeds, which are both fully balanced and low in starch, are often beet pulp or alfalfa-based. Care must be taken with these products to ensure that the full recommended amount is fed as they are often quite bulky so the volumes can look quite large. If underfed, the horse will miss out on vitamins and minerals and not be getting a fully balanced diet.

Lower Calorie Requirements

Good-doers must still be kept chewing even though forage intake may need controlling to avoid excessive weight gain. Choose coarser, stalkier hay or haylage, which is more mature and should be less nutritious yet still provide plenty of fibre to chew. Use small-holed nets to make forage last for as long as possible and consider soaking forage to leach out water soluble carbohydrates and reduce overall calorie content.

Balancers, like Lo-Cal or Performance Balancer, are ideal, when calorie requirements are lower, as they provide essential quality protein, vitamins and minerals without unwanted calories and with little starch. They can be fed with a little low calorie chaff, like Light Chaff, or a small amount of unmolassed Speedi-Beet, which is also naturally low in starch. As a bonus, beet pulp is high in the soluble fibre, pectin, which, in acidic conditions, like those in the stomach, changes its structure to one similar to mucus and has been show to bind to, and thicken, the stomach mucosa thereby protecting it from acid attack.

Flexibility

For a flexible low starch diet, the recommended amount of Lo-Cal or Performance balancer can be fed, to supply vitamins, minerals and quality protein, then non-starch calorie sources can be added as required. Alfalfa Plus Oil can supply reasonable levels of calories, from highly digestible fibre, but as it is light, feeding volumes can creep up when calorie requirements are higher, testing the more limited appetite.

Speedi-Beet and Fibre-Beet will also deliver reasonable calorie levels, with very low starch content, although, again, volumes can sometimes over face some horses so a combination of these high fibre sources plus a high oil supplement, like Outshine, can prove useful. Oil is a concentrated source of slow release, non-starch calories which can increase overall calorie intake without significantly adding to the volume fed.

Good Management

Good feed management will help reduce the risk of digestive or nutrition-related upsets, whatever the energy sources of the feed. Keeping meal sizes as small as possible will help ensure that the stomach is never over-faced so divide the daily recommended compound feed into as many small feeds as possible. When circumstances mean that meal sizes become larger than around 1.8kg per feed, lower starch, higher fibre feeds are more appropriate.