Blog

As if us carers of EMS horses haven’t got enough to focus on, along comes something else to think about … hyperlipidemia.

A closer look at methionine's role in combating the laminitis risk.

Harnessing Hormones - the science behind leptin resistance.

Meet berberine – barberry’s active alkaloid

Meet Susie, founder of of Tower House Horses

When you hear the word ‘endocrine’, what do you think of?

The Seasonal Equine Cycle - unlocking nature's rhythms. A proactive approach to sustain equine vitality year-round.

Meet Larri, founder of Horse Haven, nestled in the serene valleys of West Wales. Encompassing track-based living, individualised care plans, and a deep-rooted commitment to the well-being of each resident, Horse Haven is an extraordinary equine sanctuary which stands as a testament to Larri's lifelong passion, nurtured through decades of diverse experience, and always with the force-free, positive reinforcement ethos behind everything she does.

Perfect preventation makes perfect practice.

A gut-busting journey through how to feed our horses

Thing is, these days there's too much histamine going on out there, and it's making many already established health syndromes even worse, with humans and horses alike suffering all the more. Histamine in the right balance is the body’s friend, released when there's an allergic reaction. Simples. We know this. Histamines are a bit like a club's bouncer on the door, helping the body get rid of something that's bothering it, as in an allergy trigger, aka ‘allergen’. Histamines start the process that hustles those allergens out of the body or off the skin. Thing is, there’s a new kid on the block and we need to take notice of it because it’s a now a Big Thing - histamine intolerance. What is it? It's when too much histamine is being made by the body which causes its own allergic response, and the body feels seriously crap. The symptoms can be anything and everything from swelling to fluid retention, and so much more. It’s now recognised as a spectrum illness, with mild, moderate and severe levels to it. So let's dig a little deeper into what histamine is, and why the body is now developing a resistance to it. NB. As is usual, there's very little equine research out there, so this is based on recent human research and comparisons made to our horses. Histamine Histamine itself is found naturally in the body; the body makes it and, yes, we also consume it. It’s released by ‘mast cells’, one of the white blood cell team (the immunity protector cells) and they sit in the body’s connective tissues’ interstitial fluid, which is the thin layer of fluid which surrounds each and every one of the body’s cells. Ideally situated for when they have to spring into action. Mast cells are one of the body’s best friends, having recently been shown to have key roles in the initiation of adaptive immune responses, literally the body's killer army, and specifically relating to their role in allergies . They possess multiple pathogen recognition systems, and store large quantities of fully-active inflammatory mediators, which make them superior immunity sentinels, releasing the very earliest alarm when an offending allergy-triggering offender dares to land on the doorstep. Mast cells contain granules rich in histamine (and also heparin, the blood clot preventer), and release histamine as a first responder to those offending organisms. Yet histamine intolerance is now becoming a new label – it’s become so prevalent these days that there’s even a new medical diagnosis for it – MCAS - Mast Cell Activation Syndrome . MCAS is not just on the rise, it’s significantly on the rise. Most of us are familiar with typical raised histamine conditions/MCAS, i.e. hives, peanut allergy, raised welts from a bee sting, and dermatographia – sounds weird but you may know it - essentially it’s where you scratch your fingernail on your skin and it creates a raised red welt – you can literally write your name on your back in raised letters. Doctors actually use this letter-writing method to determine histamine levels in a patient, because when the mast cells have either excess histamine in them or they release histamine too easily, the body will develop dermatographia, so seeing letters swell up on the skin before your eyes is a surefire way to determine if there are excess levels of histamine in the body. However, there are a whole host of other multiple symptoms now coming to the fore, related to histamine intolerance, but sadly they’re poorly diagnosed, often mistreated, and they're causing real suffering. So, what’s behind this increase in mast cell activation? Here’s one clue for starters, and it’s all to do with our mobile phones and wifi, seriously. A recent Swedish study (Johannsen et al) shows that the effect of EMF - electro magnetic frequencies (mobile phones, mast towers, wifi, you name it) - on mast cells causes susceptible individuals to release more histamine that drives this allergic inflammatory response. Most conventional doctors don’t know about MCAS – their current approach remains that if there’s too much histamine, take an antihistamine. Trouble is, histamine also works as a neurotransmitter – when you take an antihistamine, what happens to you? You get drowsy. Exactly! Because – histamine’s actively involved in the sleep/wake cycle. When histamine’s at high enough levels it stimulates the brain – too much or too little histamine is bad, so when you attempt to block histamine, TaDah! You actually get sleepy. (Science nerd alert - one particular pharma drug out there, Modafinil (sold under the brand name Provigil, among others), is a pharmaceutical medication to treat sleepiness due to narcolepsy, shift work sleep disorder, or obstructive sleep apnea - it actually targets histamine to keep levels higher to keep the brain awake.) What symptoms are now being triggered by MCAS? Food intolerances are common, as many histamine triggers are in the diet, so much so that some people are on restricted diets because certain foods trigger histamine release. Equine-related Clue No.1 . Some foods also contain an amino acid, histadine, mainly found in meat, which when digested is converted into histamine. Normally the body can process this but when there’s too much ingestion of histamine, or too much production of histamine, enter histamine intolerance, typically affecting people with food allergies. So what foods are high in histamine, and best avoided? Bacteria produce histamine, so leftover food, aged cheeses, cured meats - bacteria will start to break down histadine - that's me being careful with last night's leftovers then. I hate to kill the love for fermented foods as well – which for the record also feature highly in our kitchen - but fermented foods are fermented by ... bacteria!. These amazing health foods, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, yogurt … this is where eating these wonderfully healthful foods, in a person with histamine intolerance, is like putting petrol on a fire. Other symptoms that tend to be misdiagnosed? Allergy brain for starters, feeling fuzzy/foggy in the brain, often with associated bad headaches/migraines, due to excess amounts of histamine which is now known to have an impact on the brain. Then there’s nasal congestion, sinus issues, fatigue, digestive problems, menstrual cycle problems, nausea, vomiting … and if it’s really severe we’re into cramping, palpitations, anxiety, wonky temperature regulation. Then there’s oedema, fluid retention, swelling, puffy legs – sound familiar? Cue equine-related Clue No.2. Why? Because histamine has a direct action on the lymphatic system . Those mast cells, filled with too much histamine, sitting in the interstitial fluid surrounding every cell in the body, are now leaking the excess histamine straight into the lymph fluid, which, when it’s overburdened with toxins and twinned with lack of movement, becomes sluggish and the flow slows down, resulting in swelling/oedema. Another connection – and yes it relates to my favourite topics – leaky gut and the microbiome - cue equine-relatied Clue No. 3. When the body has dysbiosis of the microbiome (SIBO - small intestinal bacterial overload) , the negative gut microbes (bacteria again!) cause the mast cells to produce more histamine. When there’s excess histamine in the digestive tract, enter food intolerances. Equally, the negative bacteria may be causing the digestive breakdown of histadine into histamine, so it’s that old dodgy-gut thing again. Diagnosis So how does a doctor diagnose these various symptoms as a histamine intolerance? What tests - other than a SIBO test - are there? Well, as per usual, testing hasn’t reached our horse world, so we can only go by the human world. Currently, histamine can be measured in the blood; another marker for mast cell activation, the enzyme tryptase, can also be measured; also n-methyl histamine, a breakdown product of histamine, can be measured. There are many more methods, i.e. enzyme testing and so on, but if I ran through them all here your eyes would glaze over. Ultimately it all comes down to one size does not fit all . We’re all unique, whether horse or human, and it’s all about precision food medicine, as in precision nutrition. Some people do great on vegan diets; others do terribly. Some do brilliantly on Keto, others not so. Eating avocados and shellfish might be great for some, but might be killing others, never mind the wine and beer we (I) love so much as well! And as for our horses, some aren't bothered at all by the spring pollens - others are floored by it. It’s very much about personalising what’s right for that particulary genetic make-up – every individual body is different. To quote one of my favourite Function Medicine doctors, "Genes load the gun, but it's diet, lifestyle, and environment exposures that pull the trigger." Where does Functional Medicine fit in? Which links us nicely to one of the many concepts of Functional Medicine , where one disease (as in dis-ease, where the body is ill at ease) can have many causes - histamine intolerance is not alone here as it can have many causes. And one cause, such as that great masquerader, Lyme disease , can create many diseases across the board, such as neurological issues, joint and skin issues, chronic fatigue, dementia ... the list goes on. And … lyme is also associated with histamine intolerance because the lyme bacteria resides/hides in the connective tissue in the body, which in turn can activate the mast cells. There are also a lot of drugs that can interfere with histamine and warning, this list is scary – antibiotics, antidepressants, antipsychotics, diuretics; even muscle relaxants, pain meds, my nemesis PPIs ... even over the counter meds like Aspirin – all can be driving this histamine intolerance. Cue equine-related Clue No 4 - several meds here relating to horses ☹ It’s been shown that certain nutrients can break down histamine, i.e the B-vits 1, 6 and 12, folate, vit.C, copper, zinc, magnesium, calcium - all critical nutrients, and foods high in Quercetin, a natural antihistamine. Ginkgo biloba is high in quercetin (also said to be beneficial for Covid), as is good old Turmeric . As is my friend, the odd glass of red wine 😉 The wondrous and super-nutritious Nettle is also known as a beneficial antihistamine as it can block the receptor sites that histamine usually latches on to, all due to its antagonist/negative agonist activity but I won't blind you with the science behind that one. And remember the enzyme tryptase from earlier, that's released alongside histamine and which promotes its effects? Nettle also inhibits tryptase - clever nettle. Both Ginkgo and Nettle feature in our PollenTonic blend. Which links us nicely to our horses Definite clues and comparisons to be had here – certainly the lymphatic connection, i.e. puffy leg syndrome, lymphangitis, CPL (chronic progressive lymphodema). And of course, all those spring tree pollens and summer grass pollens are all dumping themselves on our horses’ grazing, with no doubt plenty of pollen residue in their hay as well, which they’re then ingesting. When you look at the Big Picture, ultimately it’s yet another case of removing the bad, replacing with the right food and nutrients, looking after the microbiome, fixing the leaky gut, and letting the healing begin. Originally written Jul'21, copied over from our old website

Meet Jenny, who with her partner runs two organic farms in Cornwall. Almost a qualified BHSAI until a back injury ended her equine career, she still had driving instructor, PADI diving instructor, pet shop owner, Life Coach, Reiki Level 1, and now the UK's sole Zeolite Distributor waiting in the wings, before meeting her partner and running the farms alongside a stunning 5* campsite.

Introduction to 'functional' equine wellness

Tis’ the festive holiday season! And for most of us, we’ve probably just worked the last day before four days off, so we’re now demob happy, relaxing, taking the pressure off, and … Boom. Sure enough, this is when those winter lurgies come and hit us with their full force 🙄. For us horse folk, this can be a right royal nightmare as we still have to hoik ourselves out of the warmth and into the howling winds and gales to make sure beloved Ned gets their room service. This winter has already seen its fair share with covid still lingering, a flu doing the rounds, and a really nasty cold starting with a sore throat like razor wire, and rendering everyone I know who’s had it unable to get out of bed on Day 3. Including me, followed by the husband because of course I gave it to him. No surprise, winter brings an increase in respiratory infections (whether horse or human), because we're spending more time indoors with the heating on and lower air humidity. And here’s the thing - lower air humidity dries out the mucosa - that's the soft tissue lining of the respiratory system (plus digestive and reproductive systems) - which is usually covered with a friendly, moist and gloopy mucous, hence why it’s also called the mucous membrane. And when it comes to our respiratory mucosa, if it dries out, viruses and bacteria can travel a whole lot further inside us than they usually would. So, time for a bit of perfect prevention 😉. Perfect prevention I used to be terrible at looking after myself when the winter lurgies hit. I’m great at dishing out the advice and lugging buckets of soup, herbal teas and tinctures to sick family and friends, but when it hit me, I easily forgot the ‘how to’, then failing miserably to find any energy to blend teas in the middle of a fever. These days? I’ve now got it covered with my Winter Fix-Kit, which is permanently set up on the long oak shelf in my Zen Den. It’s the smallest room in the house which I bagged after we moved EquiNatural out from every spare inch of space in our home to our new unit up the road back in April this year. (I say ‘new’ – it’s not, far from it, more like a crumbling 1960’s converted-cow-barn, but we love it all the same 😊). Anyway, Zen Den is all mine, where all my Fix-Kit tinctures sit alongside all my well-thumbed and much-loved herbal medicine reference books from when I did my medical herbalist training back in the day. It’s also where the exercise bike, yoga mat and Body-Pump bar and bench sit, which admittedly haven’t seen much action of late. Hmm … this could well be the time of year to set some NY goals, starting with rejigging my Time Management! So, here we are in lurgy season so I thought I’d share a few of my Winter Fix-Kit tips which are so easy to set up and keep on hand for when the winter bugs hits. My personal preference is tinctures; for some reason I'm not genetically designed to enjoy the taste of herbal teas other than my beloved green tea or a spicy chai, so for me it's tinctures all the way. And while a freshly brewed herbal tea is wonderful, what’s equally great with tinctures is that while they officially keep for up to 3-years, unofficially they’re perfectly fine for 10-years or so, which makes them perfect to sit on a shelf gathering dust until we need them for emergencies or as seasonal preventatives. Or, if/when the dreaded viruses hit we can then support ourselves through them and hopefully have a much less stressful recovery. So, here we go. My Winter Fix-Kit top-tips for us humans, covering perfect prevention, the 'how to' if we get sick, and managing that all-important recovery. First up ... Keep mucosa moist When temperatures dip below freezing, there’s significantly less moisture in the air. Pair that with indoor heating and it’s a recipe for dryness, and trust me when I say that dry, sticky mucous can’t do its job effectively. And one of the body’s first layers of defence against infectious organisms are those valuale mucosal membranes. Mucous contains important components so important for immune health, which literally break down unfriendly microbe cell walls and prevent them from attaching to the mucosal cells. So how do we keep our mucusa moist? This one's nice and easy - drink plenty of water and herbal teas! I’m never without a mug of (organic of course) green tea on the go (at home we call it magic tea, as it literally in a blink kills that I-may-have-drunk-a-glass-too-many-last-night feeling). And always with lemon to kickstart the liver and kidneys. It’s my first-thing cuppa while I’m still in bed creating that day's DPD labels and replying to your emails, so if you've ever been on the receiving end of an early morning email, that's me still under the duvet with Broo the dog wedged between me and husband, with his nose up Henry's bum (huge ginger cat) who's draped over my left arm (we've perfected how to type without disturbing him), and Thomas (Henry's brother) snuggled up on my right 😁. Several more mugs later through the day, and it’s also my winter go-to when I get home after the horses. If I feel I need a boost I either add 15ml of varying tinctures straight into it, or take a mouthful of tea then squirt 3 x 5ml pipette-fulls into the corner of my mouth. When desperate I’ll squirt straight in under the tongue, the taste of which can be a little ‘interesting’ (think a botanical-tasting squirt of vodka, which, er, it actually is). Persevere though, because the gum membrane is permeable so you get immediate absorbtion into the bloodstream. Here's a brilliant herbal tea or tincture blend you can make to moisten the mucosa - it will also help soothe an incoming sore throats. Equal parts: Liquorice root Marshmallow root Wild cherry bark Fennel seed Cinnamon bark (make sure you get Cinnamomum zeylanicum – cassia isn't as medicinally potent) Orange peel Sleep The average person needs a minimum of 8hrs sleep every night, with many needing more (fat chance!). It’s said that losing just one hour of sleep per day builds up a ‘sleep debt’ of an hour per day, which can then add up. And no surprise, our immune systems are most efficient when we don’t have sleep debt. I’m a proper winter hibernator. Completely beyond my control, but it’s actually a good thing as this is exactly how it should be for the ideal seasonal circadian rhythm. I’m also a committed lark (I’m a hopeless owl), usually awake anywhere from 5am depending on when dog/cats demand breakfast, so a perfect time to check emails but also why I rarely make it past 8pm. Currently, or so the FitBit says, I’m getting a good 8-hours sleep per night so pretty much bang on. Here's the sleep checklist: Consistency I know, obvious, but going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, even on weekends, helps regulate the body’s internal clock (this also does double-duty for mental health, as our circadian rhythms affect mood). Environment Create a comfortable sleep environment by controlling light, noise, temperature, and of course a comfortable mattress and pillows. Pre-sleep routine Engage in calming activities before bed such as reading, meditation, a warm bath … these all signal to the brain that it’s time to wind down. If you’re one of those who finds it difficult to get to sleep, try taking magnesium half an hour before bed – I personally like this one . I also find a combo of magnesium and 15ml of our CalmTonic works a treat for me, so if you’ve got a 500ml CalmTonic on the shelf for Ned, decant some into a small amber tincture jar, with pipette to make life easier, otherwise measure out a tablespoonful. Avoid stimulants Again an obvious - avoid caffeine and other stimulants close to bedtime, as they will 100% interfere with the body’s ability to fall asleep. Mindful eating and drinking Always try to allow at least 3-hours between last meal and sleep time as this affects digestion, triggering the risk of GI/acid reflux and heartburn. Research also shows that eating high-calorie meals with large amounts of fat or carbs less than an hour before bedtime can extend the time it takes to fall asleep. Equally our metabolism slows down when we fall asleep so if digestion’s still going on while we’re asleep, this can cause weight gain as the calories will be stored as fat. Physical activity Regular physical exercise can promote better sleep, but strenuous workouts and getting the adrenaline buzz going too close to bedtime will guarantee you taking ages to fall into sleep. Limit naps While brief naps can be beneficial for some, long or late-day naps can negatively affect night-time sleep. Technology restrictions Another obvious - reduce exposure to keyboard screens and smartphones, as the blue light emitted can interfere with melatonin production (melatonin is a natural hormone which plays a role in the sleep-wake cycle, with natural levels in the blood being highest at night.) Managing stress Practice techniques to manage stress and anxiety, and my goto is meditation. I know it might seem a bit bonkers to some, but I discovered it when I was having what I call my ‘bad year’ of 2014 (won’t bore you with the details but oh boy did I need some help). This was the year I discovered the Institute of Functional Medicine ( IFM ), and one of the IFM doctors recommended learning meditation in a totally non-hippy way with Ziva Meditation . Cost me £50 to do the numpty course (you get a certificate of which I was very proud!). A decade on and I try (emphasis on 'try') to grab 10-15 mins each day for when I feel I need a pick-me-up or I'm a bit fried and need to ground myself. If I'm having a frantic day I'll happily sit on the edge of our horses' field, shut my eyes and do a 10-minute session - I woke out of one a few years ago to find Carmen in front of me with a very weird expression on her face! I felt a whole lot better though - it really does rejuvenate and refresh you, as well as totally improving sleep quality too. Which leads us nicely to … Stress Relief There’s a whole lot of not so great news going on in the world right now. Twin this with the festive season craziness and for some, stress levels are at an all-time high. And when we’re getting frazzled our bodies need more sleep, better nutrition, and downtime to relax, which can be nigh on impossible to find the time for. This is a good time to integrate nervine and adaptogen herbs into our daily routines. These herbs tonify the nervous system’s response to challenges, and help to reset our stress response, hence why these herbs are called adaptogens , because they literally help our bodies to 'adapt'. They’re also okay to take consistently, even when we’re feeling perfectly okay. This class of herbs is relaxing and anxiolytic in small to moderate doses, and sedative in larger doses. Linden and lavender are popular, and let’s not forget our old friend chamomile , which works really well with passionflower . Adding in lemon balm as well is said to “ add some joy into melancholy, ” ( Culpepper ). For a gentle effect I personally love milky oats and skullcap tincture 2-3 times per day. When I’m really feeling the pressure, ashwagandha with passionflower and vervain are my no-brainer goto’s - I can even at a push drink a passionflower and vervain tea, but for a swift effect (15-mins max) I take these three in tincture form. I also make sure I’ve always got L-Theanine in capsule form to gulp a couple down if I know my day’s going to be ‘interesting’ – easily available from most health shops or Amazon. Movement Exercise of all types, but especially the gentle stretching of yoga/pilates/tai chi, will increase endorphins and decrease stress levels. Importantly though, any movement moves the lymph fluid which gets toxins shifting out. If we do moderate-intensity exercise, of which I consider the daily muck-out (Murf’s stable is a full-on daily deep-clean as he’s knocking on now and his bed's revolting – put it this way; deep litter is no longer an option 😝), it promotes the circulation of the killer army of white blood cells and other immune system warriors. Regular exercise also reduces inflammation and can help our immune cells to regenerate regularly. Immune nutrients In an ideal world we'd all be eating a wide variety of dark green and colourful fruits and vegetables, with high quality fats and proteins every day. Winter’s a whole different matter though. I’m brilliant at a great diet and supplementing myself nutritionally throughout Spring to Autumn, but once we’re down to 7-8hrs daylight and I kick into hibernation mode, I forget all about the greens as more starchy comfort food starts appearing on the plate – I literally have to remind myself to cook/eat greens. And then with all the festive socials going on, will-power takes on a whole new meaning! For starters it’s not a bad idea at this time of year to take a quality multivit in your toolkit, and personally I'm a fan of the Viridian Supplements range. These nutrients won’t boost immune function if you’re not deficient in them, but being deficient will definitely suppress your immune function. Vits A and D deficiencies are particularly common in winter, but you should get enough of the other nutrients below if you’re eating a couple of servings of fruit/veggies per day, along with taking a quality multivit. Vitamin A – Contrary to popular belief, beta carotene isn’t a great source of vit.A, with studies apparently showing that around 50% of people don’t convert beta carotene to vitamin A. The cheapest way to get a large loading dose is via liquid emulsified vitamin A. Most products are 10,000iu per drop, so 10 drops (100,000iu) per day for 3 days brings levels up rapidly, but - don’t take more than 10,000iu a day after this loading dose. NB. Definitely don’t take supplemental vit.A if you have liver disease or alcohol issues. Vitamin D – Unless you supplement with vit.D your blood levels are unlikely to be at that optimum stage to maximise immunity and minimise inflammation, especially in winter when we have less light and lower temperatures keeping us inside more. Make sure you find a supplement that combines vit.D with K2. Vitamin C – Eat a few servings of fruits and veggies and you’ll get enough. If you think you need more, 1000mg of supplemental vitamin C per day is all you need to quickly boost stores. There will also be some vit.C in all multivitamins. B2, B6 (P5P), Folate (B9) and Selenium – Like vit.C, a few servings of fruits and veggies daily should give you most of what you need. That said, a decent quality multivit should have enough of the B’s, selenium and zinc to supplement even a SAD diet up to normal levels within a couple of weeks. So, there we have it. Prevention done. Moving on, what if you wake up with that sore throat? OhOh – I can feel it coming on Flu tends to hit hard and fast, but colds, even the nasty ones, tend to come on more slowly. We might feel extra tired, a little achy, feeling the chills, but then those throat glands come up and with it the slow realisation that we’re going down with something. This is the perfect time for some herbal help, and if you catch it in time it may even prevent a full blown episode. Fast-acting immune stimulants work well on the innate immune system, such as echinacea and cat’s claw in tincture form - mix together in equal parts. Warming, pungent aromatics are also excellent here - think a spicy curry or chicken soup with fresh chillies . Top tip - I always keep a week’s supply of organic chicken soup made with bone broth (which is jam-packed full of nutrients) in the freezer. Hands up, I don’t make it – I buy it in from Ossa Organics . It’s a bit pricey (I get the 6 x Chicken&Veg ) but tucked away in the freezer then whipping out when you’re feeling crap is worth every penny. I also add lots of garlic, chilli and astragalus , which IMHO is the best immunostimulant adaptogen out there. If you’re a veggie or vegan, they also do a veggie broth which you can jesse up with extras. Meanwhile, if you fancy a go yourself, here are two recipes for you. Vegan Broth 1. Fill a pot with roughly chopped carrots, onions, celery, a handful of kelp or seaweed of choice (if you can stand the flavour - I can’t sadly; I’m rubbish at sushi), fresh mushrooms, 5-10 dried shiitake mushrooms, a full head of garlic rough-chopped, a couple of slices of astragalus and as many sliced hot chillis as you can bear. 2. Season well and cover with water, simmering gently with lid on for 2-hrs. 3. Cool, strain, bag up, and stick in the freezer. Fire Cider Recipe (courtesy of ‘The Modern Herbal Dispensatory’) This is a great cold and flu remedy made as a herbal vinegar, originating from Rosemary Gladstar, a renowned American traditional herbalist who I’ve been following for years, hence why the recipe's in 'cups': ½ cup fresh horseradish root, grated (key) 1 medium onion, chopped (supporting) ½ cup fresh ginger root, grated (key) ¼ cup garlic, mashed (key) 2 jalapeno peppers, chopped (catalyst) 1 lemon (zest and juice) (balancing) 2 tablespoons dried rosemary leaves (optional balancing) 1. Place everything in a jar and cover with raw apple cider vinegar, preferably organic with ‘the mother’. If your jar’s got a metal lid use waxed or greaseproof paper before closing. 2. Keep the jar in a dark place and shake daily for 4 weeks. 3. Strain, add honey to taste if you need it, and rebottle. Take 2-tbsp up to 8 times daily as needed. Trust me, this is awesome. My final recommendation is to take Zinc in citrate form. At the first sign of feeling horrible, get this into you – it literally hunts down the virals and blows them to smithereens. I personally like this one - Cytoplan’s Zinc Citrate . Too late - I’m sick. Now what? Now it’s time to discontinue immune stimulants, get plenty of fluids into you, and use herbs to support your body’s natural processes while working on symptom control so you can rest. Seriously, go to bed. Fever Fevers are the worst. Uncomfortable, achy, hot, cold .... It’s understandable that we want to take NSAIDS to reduce the aches and chills that come along with it, but try try try to resist. Fevers are there for a reason - it's your body's way of literally burning the pathogens away by intentionally raising your core temperature. Traditionally, fevers have never been suppressed with anti-inflammatories – it’s always been about working with the body's natural processes. Instead, herbal remedies were given to help move blood to the surface of the body which facilitates sweating, and it’s the sweating which lowers the body temperature. This way you’re not suppressing that all-important fever. And as for those herbs to facilitate this process - meet diaphoretics . (This is the same principal used for staying cool in hot countries. If you look at the far-east and Indian continent, this is why they eat so much chilli – it keeps people cool! I learnt this back in the 1990s when I travelled round the world with my backpack. I was never particularly brave at eating chillies, but I got better the more I travelled. To this day I'm still a fan, especially from a medicinal point of view, although I’ve still got my limits 😉 ). There are two different types of diaphoretics: stimulating and relaxing . First up, stimulating , and if you’ve ever eaten too much cayenne and broken out in a sweat, then you've already felt the action of a stimulating diaphoretic! Stimulating diaphoretics are indicated when you feel the chills but aren’t running an actual fever yet, or at least just a low-grade one. Stimulating diaphoretics are specific for the pre- and early fever phases, but use carefully as they may dry out the mucosa. Think ginger, cayenne, horseradish, and mustard , which you can easily get from any supermarket. Equally, one of my favourite less-spicy stimulating diaphoretics is yarrow , either as a tea or tincture. It’s not so pungent but very aromatic, so less likely to dry out the mucosa than the pungent herbs are. Cardamom is another favourite, a widely available stimulating diaphoretic that doesn’t tend to dry out mucosa. Now to relaxing diaphoretics, and these promote peripheral blood flow by relaxing physical muscle and tissue tension that’s inhibiting the peripheral blood flow and sweating. Relaxing diaphoretics are indicated when there is a fever but no sweating, and you’re typically feeling very tense and cranky. My favourite relaxing diaphoretics are elderflower and peppermint . A nice classic formula for fevers combines equal parts: Yarrow as a stimulating diaphoretic. Elderflower and peppermint as relaxing diaphoretics. Best taken together as a hot infusion. Add honey liberally as a demulcent to balance the drying actions of the herbs. Fever aches and pains One herb which can support the aches and pains that accompany a fever is boneset - it's indications include bone-deep and deep muscles aches. Try 2ml of boneset tincture with a cup of chamomile tea. If you’ve got a blinding headache, drink a strong cup of green tea with 15ml skullcap tincture – pure magic 😉. The yukky bit – the snots There’s no getting away from it - respiratory irritation involves the production of mucous in all shapes, sizes and colour hues, whether we like it not. Once the infection brings on an immune response, the role of mucous shifts from being primarily a barrier, to then playing a major role in the expulsion of the ‘irritant’. The traditional herbal approach to respiratory infections has focused on herbs that directly modify the composition and rate of clearance of that mucous. In case you’re interested, there are six tissue states, and the respiratory system is a perfect place to see all six in action: - If it’s cold, warm it up. - If it’s hot, cool it down. - If it’s tight, relax it. - If it’s lax, tighten it. - If it’s damp, dry it up. - If it’s dry, moisten it. Now to the yuk, and yellow and green mucous is coloured by the presence of neutrophils , indicating heat, with white mucous traditionally considered a cold condition. This means we can opt for warming or cooling herbs in our respiratory formulas based on this. The cough And so to the inevitable cough, which unfortunately is a given. Flipping inconvenient and equally torturous, especially at night when the cough’s in full flow. The good news is that there are some excellent herbs we can use to support a cough, but just as I say when I talk about our horses’ coughs , the aim is never to suppress a cough as again, it’s there for a very good reason – to shift the irritant out. For a dry wheezy cough, consider demulcent (moistening and gloopy) herbs to moisten and soothe. We’re talking marshmallow root, liquorice and mullein leaf , my absolute favourites when it comes to demulcent expectorants. If the mucous is particularly stubborn and sticky, get yourself a pack of NAC (N-Acetyl Cysteine) capsules from Amazon and take 800mg 2-3 times a day for a couple of days, but not if you are taking nitroglycerin (for angina) or have kidney or liver disease. And while we’re talking wheezy, elecampane is probably the best herb for asthmatic symptoms, blended with mullein . If the cough is productive, meaning it’s bringing up mucous, expectorant herbs can be helpful to support this as they help with the expulsion. Aromatic expectorants such as thyme, elecampane and ginger also trigger mucous production via chemoreceptors in the nose, and through transient tissue stimulation/irritation as they're exhaled - these are also good for sinus congestion. Pair these warming herbs with demulcent herbs as needed. Finally, I know I said we don’t want to suppress that cough, but when we’re coughing so much that we can’t sleep, sometimes we need a little help. Time for antitussive (anti-cough) herbs which are useful for that never-ending frequent unproductive cough. Classic antitussive herbs are coltsfoot or wild cherry bark , and plantain is a good one too. Or if you've got one of our KoffTonic's on the shelf for Ned, decant some off for yourself. Herbal Hot Toddy Here's a herbal spin on the classic hot toddy to help relax and calm a cough in the evening. 2 droppers of coltsfoot or wild cherry bark tincture 5-10 single drops of lobelia ½ -shot of whiskey A lemon wedge Honey to taste 1-tsp of ginger juice or a couple of shots of ginger tincture Mix altogether in a finger or two of water. Onion Syrup Onion syrup is excellent for coughs and sticky, thick mucous. 1. Slice onions and place about a quarter inch in a jar, then cover with an ⅛ to ¼ inch of sugar. 2. Repeat until the jar is full. 3. Refrigerate. 4. Take 1-tsp of the honey onion juice syrup 6-10 times a day. More is better here unless you feel like it’s drying your mucosa out. Lasts 1 week. Discard and make a fresh batch weekly. Herbal Cough Syrup (Drying) This formula is an expectorant and decongestant for damp coughs when there's a lot of mucous production and sinus drainage. 2 parts wild cherry bark (key) 2 parts white pine bark (key) 1 part elecampane (supporting) 1 part liquorice root (balancing) ½ part thyme (catalyst) ½ part cinnamon (catalyst) This blend can also be made as a 1:5 tincture in 40% alcohol. Herbal Cough Syrup (Moistening) If the cough is dry and unproductive, the following formula can moisten the lungs and help expel trapped mucous. 2 parts mullein (key) 2 parts marshmallow root(key) 2 parts plantain (key) 1 part liquorice (supporting) ½ part lobelia (balancing and catalyst) This formula works best when made into a decoction (a method of extraction by boiling herbal/plant material). Finally, if your lungs are tight and tense, use a simple bronchodilator like lobelia . If there’s tension from dryness, add demulcents. Top Tip : Keep a Pulse Oximeter in your fix-kit. Covid and flu are no joke and can cause serious breathing problems. If your oxygen saturation is less than 90, take lobelia , sit down and test again 10-mins later on a different finger. If it’s still under 90, get to A&E. Sinus Congestion For upper respiratory symptoms we can use the same tissue state principles we went over for coughs to make formulas for our nasal issues. For thin drippy mucous, use organically grown (not wildcrafted) goldenseal , 1-2mls. It costs a bomb but it’s worth it. For thick congested mucous that’s difficult to blow out, aromatic herbs like thyme paired with demulcents ( mullein ) should do the trick to ease stuffiness and that stuffy, headachy feeling. Aromatic herbs are also excellent for sinus and lung congestion made into a simple steam. Here’s a recipe to make your own herbal steam blend. Herbal Steam for Congestion 2 parts thyme 1 part peppermint or spearmint 1 part eucalyptus (or 5 drops of eucalyptus essential oil added right before you begin your steam). 1. Gently simmer a handful of the herbs in a pan with a few inches of water and lid on for 8-10 minutes. 2. Let sit for another 5. 3. Get a towel, remove the lid and drape the towel over your head, bending over to cover the pan. Make sure to keep your eyes closed, and breathe in the steam for 5-10 minutes. Heaven ... Sore Throat A sore throat is usually caused by irritation from bacteria or viruses causing inflammation of the pharynx. It can also be caused by chronic coughing and dryness from mouth breathing due to sinus congestion. NB . Strep throat is a common cause of throat pain and will present with white spots on tonsils and pharynx tissue. If you think you have strep throat, you may need antibiotics. Sprays are excellent to keep around for soothing sore throats because they’re ready made, unlike gargles where you need to brew tea. Look for ingredients such as propolis and/or myrrh, echinacea and sage . Keep in mind that throat sprays made with alcohol may be best for the earliest stages of illness, but the alcohol can become irritating as the throat becomes more inflamed. Add a touch of honey if making your own to avoid this. Demulcents also soothe irritated tissues: 2 parts Marshmallow root 1 part Liquorice root 1 part Cinnamon bark A slug of honey A salt-water gargle can also be an excellent way to help with throat pain. Mix ¼-½ teaspoon of salt into warm water and gargle for 30 seconds, then spit out. Repeat 3-5 times each day. If you’re nauseous It’s not uncommon to have nausea with the newer covid variants, and sometimes with respiratory illnesses if mucous is draining into the stomach. With any illness that causes fluids to leave the body we need to watch out for dehydration, especially if we’re having a difficult time keeping fluids and/or water down. Signs of dehydration can include darker urine/less frequent urination, dry mouth and tongue, and dry eyes. You can also check this by pinching the skin upwards on the back of your hand; if you’re dehydrated, the skin will take longer to snap back into place. If you’re dehydrated, use electrolyte mixes and demulcents as well as water to hydrate. Drinking broths and soups are also a good way to hydrate while taking in nutrients. Homemade Electrolyte Solution Mix 1-litre water, ½-tsp salt, and 6-tsp sugar in a bottle or jar with lid. Shake well until salt and sugar are completely dissolved, then drink. To improve the taste, add a cup of freshly-squeezed orange or lemon juice. If using herbal infusions for hydration it’s important to sweeten them. Sugars in rehydration drinks significantly enhance the absorption rate of water and electrolytes. Meanwhile If you’re getting the hot, churny, acidic nausea common between acute vomiting sessions and right before you jump up to run to the bathroom, worth trying is peach leaf tea sipped slowly, or 5-10 drops of peach tincture in a little warm water. We also shouldn’t forget about ginger as a tea or tincture, which I personally swear by. This pungent carminative (intestinal gas soother) is excellent for the stagnant nausea that makes you feel like vomiting would make it better but it’s not happening. This type of nausea is common with covid and as a side effect in respiratory illnesses. Ginger is also excellent when paired with fennel for gut cramps. It’s also a good idea to keep demulcents on hand for diarrhea. A tea made from marshmallow leaf (not root) and plantain can be helpful here, with added honey if need be. Aromatherapy inhalers for nausea can make a great addition to your kit too – try peppermint essential oil, or a combo of peppermint and grapefruit . Recovery Finally we're coming out the other side, and Alteratives support the body’s elimination channels, as well as overall metabolism and assimilation/absorption of nutrients. They’re indicated for the end of illnesses when there’s been stagnation and lingering symptoms, especially the achy cold that isn’t bad enough to keep you from going to work, but is bad enough to keep you from concentrating on it. To quote Ed Smith, founder of Herb Pharm, “ Alteratives’ primary action is to favourably alter disordered metabolic and catabolic processes, especially those associated with the breakdown and elimination of metabolic waste. ” The exact mechanism of action isn’t well understood, so let’s call them magic too. 🙂 Following illness, I prefer alteratives that also have a lymphatic action. Gentle Alterative Formula 4 parts Echinacea 2 parts Burdock 2 parts Cleavers 1 part Violet 1 part Red Clover As important as herbs are, physical movement is even more important for fluid movement in the body. The combination of lack of movement with the increase in metabolic waste from immune cells fighting viruses and bacteria can build up in the extracellular fluid, causing that total lethargy and everything feeling rubbish. Movement alters fluid metabolism by pumping fluids through the body, allowing the metabolic waste that were in those fluids to be removed, so gentle exercise like walking, deep breathing and yoga/stretching are important. If you’re struggling with a slow respiratory recovery post infection, Codonopsis pilosula , also known as Dang Shen, is a sweet, moistening, nourishing remedy that stimulates appetite, improves digestion and absorption, and respiratory function. Take 6-30g as a decoction, or a low-alcohol fluid extract. Finally, for lingering digestive upset, regularly drink green tea with ginger and take gentle bitters before meals to help get your digestive system back to normal. NB . if you’re unlucky enough to have had covid with lingering digestive issues post infection, take cinnamon and andrographis capsules for a week or so to knock out any lingering infection in the gut. 3-caps andrographis with 1-cap cinnamon, three x day for 2-weeks. ********** TaDah! I really hope some of the above is useful - even if you've got just a few of the tinctures on a shelf somewhere, they'll be a great help for you. Meanwhile I'm already racking up lots of new blogs to publish, with a ton of latest updates to go on the editorial web pages. There's also some new products on the cards, so stay tuned for much more to come in 2024. It goes without saying to send you all my heartfelt thanks for supporting us again this year, and here’s wishing everyone health, happiness, and a wonderful Festive Holiday 😄. See you on the other side, Carol

There’s a new NHS study out that says “ One dose of antibiotics a year raises risk of sepsis by 70% ”. Image - our Carmen, who came to us with joint sepsis back in 2014.

Autoimmune diseases are a huge problem in our western world.

Healthy digestion is about more than eating healthily and making sure things are moving smoothly

I heard a great phrase the other day - 'Silo mentality'. - An attitude within an organization where departments or teams don't share knowledge or collaborate with one another, leading to difficulties in achieving long-term goals.

Once upon a time we had what turned out to be a very short stay at a (conventional stylie) BHS-Approved livery yard.

Frankincense is not just for those wise men anymore ...

Just like us humans being a reflection of our environment and what we eat, it’s exactly the same for our horses – you’ve all heard me banging on about it for long enough 😉. And when it comes to extending our health span, as in the number of healthy years we exist on this planet, it’s good to be aware of what we feed our beloved Ned, and this means also being aware of what their food itself 'consumes'. Bear with me – this will make sense in a mo … Our horses’ feedbowl diets have drastically changed in the last half-century, if not longer, because our agricultural system has moved from heirloom high-nutrient plants to a subsidised production of highly modified crops - corn, wheat, rice and soya, which directly reflect the health and quality of the conditions under which they’re grown. We now know that it’s not about the calories – it’s about the information that the nutrients in the food gives to the body. If the crops aren’t grown the right way, the nutrients don’t end up in what they absorb, and then they don’t end up in our horse – or us, for that matter. And when it comes to our horse feed, unless a brand is labelled ‘organic’ (meaning grown without chemical sprays and in healthy nourished soil), or if said feed contains refined, artificial, processed junk fillers, there’s going to be limited – if not pro-inflammatory and gut-damaging – information in that food that then becomes part of them. In our modern-day human diets alone, intensively farmed rice, wheat and corn account for 40-60% of our calories in the form of ultra-processed food. But – there’s some exciting new research from a recent clinical trial, carried out by a favourite of mine in The IFM, Dr Jeffrey Bland, who’s a nutritional biochemist by training and founder of a lovely company called Big Bold Health. This trial shows the incredibly positive impact of phytochemicals on immune system aging, and how to utilise the power of nature’s anti-aging wisdom through food. NB. Again, as per most of my IFM study blogs, it’s based on human studies, but again we can absolutely relate it to our horses. It's only recently that science has started to uncover the mysteries of human aging, learning that harnessing the wisdom of nature may provide some important insights for longer, healthier lives. Immune system aging is now being evaluated with the help of plant genetics, cracking open the incredible world of phytochemicals, and how these plant compounds may be the key to avoiding and reversing chronic disease. The message is that there’s more to it than just the molecules of which the food is made up of. So what causes the immune system to become dysfunctional as we age, what causes the acceleration of inflammation, and how does it all connect to the aging of the body as a whole? We are what we eat, and food is information for the body, full stop. And particularly, phytochemicals are the plant’s direct chemicals, and it’s now known that as food, these phytochemicals are massive bioregulators. Now here’s a thought, and let's go back to those calories. Previous thinking was that nutrition was just that - calories, and we either ate too few, too many, or got it just right. And within those calories you had the three principle calorie contributors - protein, carbohydrate and fat. And then there were some accessory factors that were helpful to support metabolism to use those calories – we call them vitamins and minerals. This was nutrition back in the day. But then when we started asking questions, and when the chemical composition of plant food was analysed, there was other stuff, but no-one knew what to do with it when it came to thinking of it as food for us. Food producers would say, “Nah, that other stuff is kind of pointless. We’ll take it out and throw it away. Maybe put it in pet food, but it’s not important for humans.” And what was this flotsam stuff? Phytochemicals, aka phytonutrients. Back in the old days, if you went to a traditional nutrition textbook that generations of nutrition experts were trained in, and checked how many pages in those huge textbooks mentioned ‘phytochemicals’, it would be a matter of a few pages. They were considered non-essential because back then secondary compounds weren’t known about, so weren’t even considered. (Same for our vets and GPs - during their very extensive medical training, studying using food as medicine was/is virtually non-existent.) Now, one of the most exciting singular geekisms that I’ve learned since training as a herbalist is that these compounds, these literally thousands and thousands of different plant-derived secondary metabolites that the genes of plants make for us, or rather for them actually – they all have a major purpose for the plant itself, and then when we eat them they’re also incredibly beneficial. They’re not just there because the plant didn’t have anything better to do with its time; they weren’t that bored that they thought, “Today I’m going to make glucosinolates ( sulfur-containing phytochemicals which make cruciferous veggies like broccoli or cabbage so healthful) , then tomorrow I’m going to make catechins because I like green tea.” No. The plant does this because it gives them a selective advantage based on their own individual immune systems. And these compounds that are found in plants, these secondary metabolites, are amazing agents that regulate the expression of genes at the executive centre of function (sorry, bit geeky there). But knowing this, you might very well ask the question, “What’s most important? The genes themselves, or the way they’re expressed?” Well, that’s a difficult question to answer because they’re both pretty important. But if you don’t express your genes in the right way, you’re a mess. I mean, remember that every cell in your body contains the book of your life of all the chromosomes that allow your body’s DNA to be accurately copied with each and every cell division (and remember, there are trillions of different cell types in the body), which ensures that our inner workings proceed smoothly and efficiently. So, how does this happen? How does a liver cell stay a liver cell when it has a message for a brain cell or a skin cell? It does so by regulatory elements that are directly tied to the phytochemicals in the diet as to how they actually function. And they’re not only regulators, or antioxidants or anti-inflammatories – they’re also signal transduction agents , which are incredibly important – they block bad signals in a cell which may produce cancer cells. Science now knows that phytochemicals have purposeful action in specific cell activities, and in specific cell types, to regulate their function so that particular cell will do something in response to a signal. But - that signal could be a stress; it could be exposure to an antibiotic, or a foreign chemical, and so on. So, if you have a diet that’s rich in glucosinolates like sulforaphane (found in broccoli which suppresses cancer cells), then the liver cells pick up the message. And what does it then do? Sorry - here we go: 🤓 ScienceAlert! 🤓 And very KPU-connected . It activates and upregulates the involvement with Phase 2 conjugation , which sounds horribly nerdy but if you’ve been supporting your horse as a KPU candidate and have read our KPU page , this will make perfect sense! (And why we're adding P5P - activated B6 - into their diet ...). In simple terms, what it means is that the liver can biotransform toxins into a water-soluble excretable form for the kidneys to excrete, so playing a direct role in protecting the body against toxic agents that might create dysfunction. Pulling this together, what we all learned in school about phytochemicals, if you even studied it at all, is old news. And that’s the beauty of science. We like to think that the human body of knowledge is advancing to answer questions that previously we just glossed over and thought they weren't important, because we didn’t think we needed them so no one ever proved they’re useful. Until now 😉. Now we know that these molecules interact with our receptors, our cells, our hormones, our brain chemistry, our microbiome, our immune system … in so many different, fabulous, ways. However, there’s also a conversation going on that with these compounds being the plants’ defence mechanisms, their pest deterrants, their immune system to fight off bad things - isn’t there a risk that if we consume them, we’re ingesting little poisons that we’re putting in our body that could potentially harm us? I mean, there’s phytates – a plant’s primary protector for bacterial infections and insects; in the human diet it's thought phytates may affect the absorption of important nutrients such as zinc, iron, and calcium. Then there’s oxalates , which plants use to regulate their own internal mineral content and help defend against predators, yet if us humans eat them it's thought they can bind to minerals like calcium in the kidneys and form calcium oxalate kidney stones. But … there’s also a school of thought that thinks that perhaps we're missing the fundamental point of what’s going on, so now we need to introduce a new word – hormesis; this is the theory that something that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, a bit like exercise or fasting. And it’s thought that these phytochemicals are hormetic agents , and yes, these are compounds that may be a little bit irritating to the body, but that irritation, just like exercise or fasting or hot or cold therapy, may actually trigger a response to create a benefit. So, let's go back to those broccoli compounds – glucosinolates; they’re basically a signal to upregulate the body’s own enzymes for detoxification. And this is now thought to be incredibly important. This concept of hormesis - we have to differentiate between the mechanism of treating a disease with a drug (that may have significant side effects) and eating foods that have bioactivity ingredients in them. Plants as food have undergone the largest scientific study in the history of any living species. They have survived in their environments as a consequence of the process of natural selection, to hermetically contain substances that allow them to have an immune system to defend against some of the most hostile environments. For example, if you think about a corn plant out there every day with its arm stretched up to the baking sunshine with no protection ... seriously, that’s going to mean instant sunburn, so how does corn protect itself? Well, rather cleverly it develops xanthophylls - molecules that protect photosynthetic organisms from the potentially toxic effects of light, and carotenoids - what give plants their vibrant pollinator attractants colours and antioxidants, but are also SPF compounds that prevent them from oxidative injury from ultraviolet light. And so they have these natural protectors at the right levesl to provide the optimal protection against their environments that they've been living in for hundreds of thousands of years. If you think about it, plants have had to survive in really hostile environments - bad soil, bad weather, baking sun, hard frosts, intense heat, bugs that want to eat them; they’ve had to develop by a natural evolution of hormetic compounds that make up their own immune system, which now, as it turns out, help us too. When we eat these plants that contain these hormetic defence immune substances, they transfer that immune principle to us. Which is now becoming the beginning of an extraordinary chapter in our modern-day way of life. Another example, and there's a new foodie buzz going on out there – google it, it’s everywhere! Meet Himalayan tartary buckwheat. A 4,000-year-old domesticated crop that is some 50-times higher in immune-potentiating nutrients than common buckwheat. And why does it have that extraordinary power? Because it grew on the slopes of the Himalayas in extraordinarily bad soils that were high in aluminium. Which means … it has an aluminium-detoxifying gene. It’s frost-resistant, it’s drought-resistant, it’s-bug resistant, and it doesn’t require irrigation. You just throw it on the ground with decent soil and Boom, one crop of Himalaya tartary buckwheat, which by the way makes great pancakes 😉. Thing is, it’s also been ignored for the last century of so because … it has a flavour, and food labs don’t like naturally flavoured foot because they want to add sugar and fat and synthetic junk to sell it as a refined, artificial, processed foodstuff and make a profit … Back to what causes the immune system to become dysfunctional as we age. What causes the acceleration of inflammation as we age, and how does that connect to the aging of our whole body? And how do we use plants to affect this? So, the body responds to the experience of life which is then directly associated with biological aging. Plans and goals go to hell and back, stuff comes up, and that’s life. It happens and we have to be resilient. But how is resilience manifested in the body? We’re talking mainly via three different cell types, three different tissues that are constantly sampling the outside world, 24/7/365: The nervous system. The mucosal tissues in the respiratory and gastrointestinal tract. The immune system. They’re all cross-talking one to the other all the time, and so when we start talking and thinking about, and feeling our life’s experience, this in-built information system picks up the bad news because there's always going to be some kind of trauma somewhere along the road. The question is, how do we deal with the trauma? Does it stick and stay there irreversibly? And if it does, does it simply accumulate over a lifetime? Some people call these immune scars, and let’s face it, we’ve just had a big episode of immune scars called COVID. And probably the majority of people are carrying some legacy of what that virus left on their immune system that’s now permanently altered from that experience. So, is this a one-way street? The good news is that No, nothing in life is a one-way street 😉. Where there’s damage, there’s repair – it’s called rejuvenation , and the body is capable of rejuvenating. Every -thing can be modulated by a reversible set of principles that’s in our physiology, but only if we give it the right tools to work from , otherwise we’ll be leaving it to the luck of the draw and we'll get worse as we grow older. And for the record, we're not just talking physiologically or metabolically damaged - it can be behaviourally damaged. It can be about feeling rejected, unloved, unappreciated. It’s a form of deficiency - not like a vitamin deficiency but a social support deficiency, and it leaves marks. All of these deficiencies collectively work together to create who we are and how our aging process manifest in our body. So now let’s go further down the rabbit hole, with a little bit of the science of what’s happening to our immune system as we get older, which then causes it to generate more of this chronic inflammation that’s at the root of what we call inflammaging . And then how we combat this to change it and reverse the process. 🤓 ScienceAlert! 🤓 Okay, so there are these cell types that are associated with biological aging – they’re called SASP cells, which stands for the mouthful that is senescent-associated secretory phenotypes . So what does this mean in English? Zombie cells! Zombie cells that don’t die, and run around bring inflammation in their wake. Here’s where feeling sad has an effect. These zombie cells’ genes are the same as other cells in the body, but they’re communicating a different message because they’ve been modulated by life's experiences to be shifted into an alarm state. So, once we've got a zombie cell, does this mean that a zombie will live in your body forever? Good news again - No. Science only recently now knows that there are processes in the body - for which Nobel Prizes have been won – for this discovery. Rejuvenation is making them better. However - it doesn’t mean that you’ve completely eradicated aging because the clock still ticks, but it’s removing these accelerants of the process of chronic inflammation that’s associated with all the health issues that we commonly associate with the physiology of aging. Pulling this together, we know that these zombie cells accumulate as we get older, thanks to seeing more of life’s great tapestry of crap for longer, and meanwhile other things happen to our immune system which decreases our ability to fight infection and so on - the ever increasing ripple effect of increasing inflammation on one side, and a decreased ability to respond to threats on the other side. And yet there’s this fabulous concept called immuno-rejuvenation, and it’s all about particular unique phytochemicals (such as those in Himalayan tartary buckwheat) which have this remarkable ability to not only rejuvenate the immune system, but can actually turn back the biological age clock by (apparently) five to seven years. Here’s how When you think about a longevity diet, these are the foods that we should be thinking about if we’re going to focus on rejuvenating our immune system, reversing the hallmarks of aging, and reversing our biological age through food: First up, and whether human or horse, low glycemic (foods that affect blood sugar/glucose level) and steering clear of processed foods . Humans - eat the rainbow (and not foods that are coloured from synthetic food dyes!). You’re going to get a whole different array of carotenoids and flavonoids and polyphenols and quercetin from a selection of rainbow coloured foods. Horses and humans – think prebiotics ! Always think of the rich diversity of prebiotic-rich fibre foods that are beneficial to the fibre-fermenting microbes in the large intestine (horse’s hindgut). Let’s nip back into the rainbow because we can’t just live on berries alone - there are a lot of different plants that can help activate our longevity pathways. There are those foods that provide maximum benefit because they provide protein, carbohydrate, good fats, and all the vitamins and minerals that we could live off. Then there are others that should be include in the diet that we wouldn’t necessarily consume as a major food stuff, i.e. cruciferous vegetables - cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, sprouts - a really important part of a complete diet. Nuts and seeds because they carry the germ seed of the germinating plant (but not peanuts because they’re a legume). And then there are the controversial foods like soya. And I don’t mean GM soya - I’m talking about non-GM soya. Soya’s got a pretty bad reputation due to its GM connection, but non-GM soya has a whole remarkable portfolio of phytochemicals. Soya in its natural state and particularly cultured soy like tempeh, is an excellent protein food, in moderation. So there we have it - food as medicine when it’s appropriately applied. The rather brilliant news is that there are now major business foundations (The Rockafella Foundation for one) who are independently funding multi-million studies on food as medicine, moving it more to regenerative agriculture. This is really starting to happen in an area where I can clearly remember when I even suggested food as medicine, I'd be ridiculed and laughed out of any conversation - DEFRA and the VMD still hold the reins very firmly on that one ... The tide is turning - it’s so exciting to see these things starting to move forward, and who knows … maybe in time we’ll actually transform from a conventional pathology-focused pill-for-every-ill system, to a more natural health-focused culture, to help both us - and our horses - recover through chronic injury and illness, and even live longer 😉.

"Fix the cell to get well."

Needing a break from the new website design, I went off surfing for a blog subject, and very topically came across a seasonally appropriate article on sugar content in our paddocks, which I'm pretty sure is right up there at the top of the list for every one of us at this time of year! So, after an ‘interesting’ start to our year - almost 4-months of torrential deluge which triggered the highest levels of tree pollen allergies and laminitis that we’ve ever seen here with our EquiNatural clients, followed by an almost overnight drought with soaring temperatures and dried, cracked, baked paddocks with zero grass - what better time to do a quick blog on this very subject? All courtesy of Dr Christina Fritz, with a guest article from Helmut Muß of Die gute Pferdeweide , translated as ‘The Good Horse Pasture’, who breaks this all down for us and explains what factors influence sugar in grass. Quick reminder - Sugar is the fuel for plant growth and forms the main source of energy for our horses – cellulose, which consists of complex linked sugar molecules and sits in the stems of grass that’s been allowed to grow. Then there’s our old friend fructan, a short-term sugar storage that the plant produces to store its sugar when it produces more than it uses. Now to the three important factors that determine our grass’s sugar content - the weather , the soil's nutrients , and the various grass species themselves. Weather We all know that grass needs heat, sunlight, water, CO2, and specific minerals, to produce its fuel - sugar. Temperatures below 5-8 C° or above 25-30 C° will cause the rate of photosynthesis and growth to drop sharply. If it’s too cold, the biochemical reactions take place too slowly, growth will stop, and the sugar is stored as fructan. Too hot, and the plant’s stomata - its cellular breathing pores on the leaf blades – close up. During normal temperatures, water naturally evaporates with new water being drawn from the soil into the leaves, but if it’s too hot, the plant will lose too much moisture, so the stomata are closed so the cellular biochemical processes can temporarily shut down. However, don’t think this means the grass is safe - fructan values naturally increase at this time in order to store the sugar for later growth. Grass will also happily grow when it’s cloudly, provided there’s enough sugar in it’s stores and the right temperature. For example, on a warm night much of the fructan stored during a hot day will be converted into cellulose/hemicellulose, pectin and other structural carbs, so the fructan content the next morning after a warm night will be significantly lower than the previous evening. Cool nights and/or a morning grass frost? The conversion of sugar/fructan into structural carbs slows down, but, if the next day is sunny and warmer, the fructan content will also rise due to the magic of photosynthesis, which will produce ... more sugar. If it’s really hot? 30-C plus, photosynthesis comes to a standstill. If it’s also bone-dry, like the recent spell we’ve just experienced, growth also stops and the sugar/fructan content remains stable. If we’re lucky enough that the overnight temperature drops to below 25 C° at night (so at least we can sleep through it) the grasses will use the remaining sugar/fructan reserves for growth, but the overall sugar/fructan content will decrease if there’s no rain, which is what we've just had in Somerset till last week. Here's a snapshot: • Daytime sunshine/cold night – very high fructan content • Daytime sunshine/warm night – middle • Daytime cloud or rain/warm night – low • Daytime cloud or rain/cold night – middle • Persistent dry - high Kind of obvious I know, but shady areas such as under trees, will have a lower fructan content than open areas thanks to the reduced sun power, so we'll get longer grass during dry spells due to the higher soil moisture in the shade. Mineral nutrients Here’s a perfect analogy that The Good Horse Pasture website uses - "If there’s no bricklayer, a house won’t be built, no matter how many electricians and carpenters are on the construction site." Same with grass growth and its nutrient needs. As always, the correct balance of nutrients can be complex as the grass plant needs all its required nutrients in both balanced, and sufficient, ratios to grow. If a nutrient is missing, the grass’s metabolic growth processes won’t happen, hence why a basic soil analysis is always a good plan as each grass species has its own requirements, strengths and weaknesses. Exactly the same as our horse’s chemistry; their body needs all its required minerals in the right ratios/balance to each other, in order to grow and thrive, hence why we have equine ' mineral balancers '. And, of course, the nutrient requirements of the grass type will depend on the soil nutrient quality and the climate, i.e. alfalfa/lucerne requires practically no nitrogen in the soil for its growth, whereas every horse’s nemesis, ryegrass, becomes stressed if there’s not enough nitrogen in the soil. Don’t think this is a good thing, though, as when stressed, ryegrass will form very high sugar values with low protein values (never mind that it’s also considered toxic due to its high endophyte content, which as we all know too well can trigger laminitis, as well as foetal abortion). Grass-species sugar differences In a US study from 2018 (Utah and Colorado), total sugar levels were measured on 24 different types of grass over two years. No surprise for guessing which came out of top – ryegrass! Up to a whopping 36% was measured, yet you’ll still see ryegrass in paddock seed mixes, and even often described as ‘low-fructan’ 🙄 The ryegrass was closely followed by tall fescue, then a bit of a gap to timothy, red fescue and meadow foxtail. To conclude No need to suggest to any horse carer to watch what the weather’s going to do 😉, but if you can provide a shaded area for persistent drought and warm, sunny days with cold nights, you’ll get less sugar/fructan than areas open to the blazing sun. Also, it may pay to be mindful of a needs-based supply of nutrients in your pasture. A soil analysis isn’t expensive, but definitely a whole lot cheaper than acute laminitis or colic. It would seem that the more a horse reacts to sugar/fructan, the more diverse the grass species should be, with ryegrass completely banned. I’m still shocked to hear of former cattle farms who have diversified to offer equine livery facilities, still with visible and abundant ryegrass in the pastures. To quote one of my favourites, "A horse is not a cow." Despite what some farmers might think ...  I’ll leave you with a final thought - apparently, just because your grass has been eaten down to the ground, it’s not necessarily poor quality! How sugar-rich the grass is will always depend more on the grass species, the weather, and the soil nutrient levels, so maybe it’s not a bad plan to be factoring in a routine annual health plan for our grasslands. Our beloved metabolic-sensitive poppets will definitely thank us for it 😉

Finally. Finally! The never-ending rainfall that lasted the entire month of March seems to have passed, and our horses are now back out on the spring grass, which thanks to all that rain is now surging through like a runaway train. After 3-days our 29yo connie, Murphy, came in looking like he was in shock and could barely move, so needless to say I’m restricting his grass access significantly, doubling up on our MetaTonic and with added Alcar , plus our WildFed going into his feedbowl to give him plenty of natural prebiotic roughage. Thank all the gods that his pulses were nice and slow ... And so to balancing the minerals to the change of seasons, and it's a given that the grass chemistry has changed significantly following the barren winter growth, so it’s really important that we’re mindful of what changes, if any, need to be made to our horses’ nutrients. When it comes to vitamins, a horse will (apparently, according to Dr Christina Fritz) absorb sufficient A and E vitamins from just 30-minutes on growing grass. Apart from the fact that an oversupply of vitamins can cause just as many issues as a deficiency, most vitamins supplied in feeds or as a supplement are synthetic so completely pointless anyway, as the liver will simply discard them as unrecognisable and unusable, and send them straight out for excretion in the waste. As the saying goes, “An expensive way to make urine,” (and a Top Tip - always check the ingredients of what you're feeding). Equally, Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the form of brewers yeast should also be reconsidered, especially if you’re still feeding it as a source of the B-vit complex, which as we've now known for a couple of years is unnecessary as they’re not in the necessary ‘activated’ form. With many peer-reviewed studies out there now questioning feeding S.cerevisiae generally, it's also now known that brewer's yeast promotes the colonisation of lactic-acid bacteria in the horse's hindgut, causing a major issue in the gut microbiome generally because they acidify the GI tract with lactic-acid, which lowers the pH value, which is never ideal as the microbiome is dependent on a neutral pH environment, and especially so for foals ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jpn.12923?campaign=wolearlyview&fbclid=IwAR1mDtjhJ-NWnZy7w9ifZOdAOHzz_I9Qqitb8WKCYDl1THhZOybZMbfwGLM ). It’s also useful to be aware that the hype about ‘organic’ (chelated) minerals is not what it seems, and is more about the goal of the various marketing departments promoting what they think is a USP over competitors’ ‘inorganic’ (natural) minerals. So, a perfect moment for a well-timed reminder of the actual science. If you hark back to our June’21 Blog – ‘ Minerals and it’s All-Change ’, you’ll see the very first sentence saying “ … synthetic - and organic - minerals, are the same thing.” Yep, I was baffled too. How can synthetic be organic? Have to say that it was a real hands-in-the-air moment for me, having spent years previously and proudly promoting the fact that we (used to) only used organic ‘chelated’ minerals in our EquiVita/VitaComplete range. It was the 'organic' word that really put the cat amongst the pigeons, because it suggested that ‘chelated’ minerals were a more natural, uncontaminated product, which made the former mineral type used, ‘inorganic’ sulphates, sound chemical, themselves being the synthetic version, and therefore completely inappropriate to feed. Wrong! As it turns out, when it comes to minerals, the term 'organic' has a very different meaning to what we all think of when it comes to plants/veg/fruit. In mineral terms, organic is actually the chemical, made-in-a-lab chelated version; 'inorganic' is the natural mineral form such as sulphates, coming directly from soil or rock. So, in this instance, organic v. inorganic is completely the reverse to our normal way of thinking, unless you're a biochemist, of course. And here’s the rub. Sorry to say but organic chelated minerals aren't recognised by the gut mineral receptors/transporters or the liver, which then has to try and biotransform them to be utilised by the body. (And if you’re doubting what I'm saying here, sign up to the ‘Feed your horse fit’ course run by Dr Christina Fritz. It's intense science, just a bit mind-blowing, but worth every penny and second of your time - it'll change everything you ever thought you knew about caring for your horse.) Back to organic chelated minerals aren't recognised, and here’s why. Horses actually have a very sophisticated absorption system for minerals in their intestinal wall, which works via specialised receptors and transporter molecules. These transporters are individually tuned to recognise a specific mineral (or vitamin, or any other nutrient such as amino acids), and are only activated when the levels in the body of the relevant mineral (or any other nutrient) are low, with the transporter deactivating as soon as the specific nutrient's level is full. Which means - minerals are only absorbed when the body needs them , otherwise they remain in the digesta and are excreted on out with the waste. With me so far? Okay, so now we get to those ‘organic’ synthetic minerals, as in not the real deal, because they’re man-made in a lab by scientists who (very cleverly) bind the perfectly healthy, recognisable mineral to another molecule, usually an amino acid. Which isn’t how nature made them. And no surprise - the horse’s gut receptors don’t recognise them as a mineral, because something synthetic isn't natural nutrition (even if the word ‘organic’ suggests it). So what happens? This 'organically'-bound mineral bypasses the actual mineral transporter in the intestinal wall and is taken up by the amino acid transporter instead. However, when this tweaked amino acid with the attached mineral reaches the liver, the liver realises that a mineral is mistakenly attached so considers the amino acid defective. It then splits it off and converts it ready for excretion, sending it on its way to the kidneys for elimination via the urine, while sending the perfectly fine inorganic mineral out into the bloodstream to be utilised. Great! You'd think ... However, what we have now is a mineral stowaway, happily circulating in the bloodstream whether the body needed it not because remember, the mineral gut receptors ignored it, because they didn't recognise it, so never had a chance to decide whether the body needed it or not. So we’re now risking potential toxic overload, and especially when it comes to selenium (see further on). To be fair, you could say that these synthetic chelated minerals could be useful in the case of proven mineral deficiencies, because they’ll certainly replenish the stores in the shortest possible time, but emphasis has to be on the word ‘proven’. However, they’re pointless for use in a mineral balancer which are only ever intended to compensate for the well known, and let's face it, fairly minimal deficiencies in our grass and dried forage. However, with selenium it's a completely different case. When we look at organically-bound selenium (known as selenium yeast in your list of ingredients), we need to take this seriously as there’s a very fine line between safe selenium intake and selenium toxicity. And here I’ll quote from our original 2021 Blog … “So, as before, the liver meets the tweaked 'chelated' selenium, usually attached to either cysteine or methionine amino acids (so hence known as selenomethionine or selenocysteine). Gets a bit science-y now but hang in there as it all comes out in the wash, promise, and it's only one sentence long, so stand by your guns and here we go … 🤓 Science Alert! 🤓 In nature, cysteine/methionine are usually bound to sulphur in a specific position, which stabilises the protein structure, but the protein can only work when this structure is fixed , which is only completed by that sulphur bond . I know, I know ... read it again, rinse and repeat. But put simply (I hope ...), when the liver sees selenium inside cysteine or methionine, instead of the sulphur they’re normally bound to, it recognises these amino acids as – you've guessed it - yet another unstable, defective protein! But - here's where selenium is now different to those other chelated minerals. The liver doesn't know what to do with these particular unstable proteins so instead of sending them on to the kidneys for excretion, it sends the whole thing out to the cellular tissues to be stored. (Don’t ask me why – I’m no biochemist, but Dr Christina Fritz is!) Now here's the thing - it can take up to a year for these proteins to be degraded – seriously. Yes you read that right - up to a year for these proteins to be degraded . Which means ... they remain in the body, unused, for a very long time, which risks considerable selenium excess being stored in the tissues, which means there's now the risk of subclinical selenium toxicity bubbling under the surface, and worse, can apparently only rarely be detected via bloods, so there may be subclinical selenium toxicity and we won’t even know it. So how might we see the effect of this? Typically we'll see this in the hooves – we know both cysteine and methionine as important proteins to build hoof wall/keratin and body hair, but when you feed chelated selenium it's been noted that the hoof capsule's quality changes. The hoof wall may become weaker/softer, as well as being behind multiple hoof abscessing, white line disease, and a brittle mane/tail that breaks. Back to today, and as at 2023, a number of other health conditions such as coronet ruptures to EOTRH, or EMS/IR and Cushing's symptoms are now suspected to be related to selenium oversupply due to chelated selenium yeast. Courtesy again from Dr Christina Fritz. The take-away message here is that it's absolutely not advisable to supplement the diet with chelated selenium, and only replenish the deficient selenium requirement with inorganic, as in natural, selenium - sodium selenite - in the mineral feed. Which for the record is what we use here at EquiNatural. WIth us you can be assured that we only use inorganic ‘natural’ minerals throughout, balanced to our UK grassland deficiencies (as per the NRC guidelines), and with no palatability additives such as molasses, apple pectins, wheatfeed, or any other junk filler. Our EquiVita and VitaComplete are formulated to be fed safely and gut-appropriately, i.e. feed our VitaComplete during winter/if your horse is on a full hay diet, and our EquiVita during summer when out on grass. Or if your summer routine is out during the day/in at night, so grass and hay, add in a pro-rata amount of micronised linseed to balance the omega-3. Oh, and don’t forget the salt 😉. Happy Spring, Carol Edited to add ... So now we get to the potential backlash : (Again copy/pasted from our 2021 Blog post) "Of course there will be some that say they've been feeding chelated for years and their horse is fine. There'll be others that say that the associated liver stress hasn't been well documented, or that chelated minerals behave like inorganic minerals anyway. As for selenium yeast, again some will say there's no more danger of toxicity than with inorganic because with selenium it's dosage dependent, and that subclinical (aka asymptomatic) toxicity is a meaningless claim unless toxic levels are confirmed by blood work. Thing is though, like chelated copper and zinc, the selenium in bound in the protein, hidden like a Trojan Horse, so bloods won't show selenium levels, just the proteins. For me this has to be a no-brainer, and with my EquiNatural hat on, the clue's in our name - we are nothing if not as natural as we can be, and this is no exception. Evolution has made the gut receptors only recognise the natural, inorganic mineral form and they know whether the body needs it or not, which means evolution’s design for the horse’s natural gut:liver function operates as it’s meant to. Whereas ... chelated minerals mess with the body’s biological metabolism and confuse the whole process, putting extra work on the liver and kidneys, as well as risking dysbiosis in the microbiome. And, lest we forget, chelated minerals also provide a lot less mineral for your buck - they provide much less elemental mineral compared to the sulphate form, so we need to feed much more of it, and they're considerably more expensive so the overall cost of the balancer is higher. Sulphates go a lot further, so your balancer lasts longer, and is cheaper with it. To conclude, and in my humble opinion, In order to ensure a natural, evolution-appropriate absorption of what's needed into the bloodstream to then be utilised directly by the cells, thereby avoiding stressing the liver biotransformation process and the already fragile equine metabolism, inorganic natural minerals in sulphate form have to be the better choice." For numerous peer-reviewed studies, see our 2021 Blog Post Minerals - and it's All-Change . Originally posted 22.4.23

The latest on Histamine Intolerance, aka MCAS - Mast Cell Activation Syndrome

... and a kind of testimonial 😉

- Turning the good genes on and the bad genes off

- Continuing the importance of feeding appropriate prebiotics (See our previous Blog Prebiotics for Postbiotic Abundance )

Look after the gut, and the gut will look after you Image - Murf, Carms, MacAttack, Cookie & Pops, Mar'2020

I think we all know that the default state of the body is to continuously regenerate, and whether human or horse, without this continual cell turnover within the body, our bodies would simply not exist. However, when the body’s sick, those regenerative processes are overcome by degenerative ones, and it’s well known these days that drug-based medicine invariably uses chemicals that have little regenerative potential, simply suppressing symptoms and burying them deeper, which almost always interferes with natural self-renewal. There’s good news though – the natural world can step in here, bringing the body back into balance with food, herbs, and nutrients. Nerve Regeneration There are a broad range of natural compounds with proven nerve-regenerative effects. A 2010 study published in the journal Rejuvenation Research found a combination of blueberry, green tea and carnosine have neuritogenic (promoting neuronal regeneration) and stem-cell regenerative effects in an animal model of neurodegenerative disease ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20586644/ ). It gets better - other researched - and safe for horses - neuritogenic substances include: 1. Curcumin (from Turmeric ) 2. Berberine (found in bitter herbs such as Goldenseal and Barberry ) 3. Blueberry 4. Resveratrol 5. Ashwaganda Berberine is also specifically beneficial as a remyelinating compound, which stimulates the repair of the protective myelin sheath (a sleeve (sheath) that's wrapped around each nerve cell (neurons), and which is often damaged in neurological injury and/or dysfunction, especially autoimmune and vaccine-induced demyelination disorders ( https://greenmedinfo.com/pharmacological-action/neuritogenic ). Liver Regeneration Glycyrrhizin, a compound found within liquorice, has been found to stimulate the regeneration of liver mass and function in the animal model of hepatectomy ( https://greenmedinfo.com/article/compound-found-licorice-known-glycyrrhizin-accelerates-liver-regeneration-and- ). Other liver regenerative substances include: 1. Carvacrol (a volatile compound in Oregano ) 2. Curcumin 3. Vitamin E Hormone Regeneration Hormones can degrade into potentially carcinogenic metabolites, courtesy of our old friend the free-radical (molecules with an odd (unpaired) number of electrons so an unhappy molecule that then wreaks cellular havoc). Yet another old friend, good ol' Vitamin C, is a powerful electron donor, and can regenerate estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone hormones which have degraded. Cardiac Cell Regeneration Until recently it was thought that cardiac tissue was incapable of being regenerated, yet a rapidly growing body of experimental research is now showing that there are heart-tissue regenerating compounds known as neocardiogenic substances. These include : 1. Resveratrol 2. Siberian Ginseng (Eleuthero) 3. N-acetyl-cysteine Cartilage/Joint Regeneration When it comes to degenerative joint disease, there are a broad range of potentially regenerative substances: 1. Curcumin 2. Resveratrol 3. Vitamin C 4. Vitamin E 5. CBD Oil 6. Boswellia 7. Glucosamine. 8. Eleuthero & Panax Ginseng - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1988502 NB - Glucosamine sulphate is recognised by the liver as the natural version of glucosamine (the more commonly used Glucoamine HCL is synthetic) and gets into the joints with positive improvement; Glucosamine HCL doesn't because try as it might, the liver can’t convert HCL to a sulphate. Our JointReflexa is formulated using Glucosamine sulphate. Originally published 21.9.22

Not that I'm wishing to drag the year towards winter, but what a difference a couple of weeks make. There we were a couple of weeks ago melting in a heatwave and droughts everywhere; two weeks on and we've thankfully had the desperately needed heavy rain and - relief all round - cooler temperatures. And ... two of our horses are already showing they've noticed because they're already going through their autumn coat change. My retired connie, 29yo Murf, is no more my sleek, silky, dappled summer boy - he's now sporting an oily, thicker, coarser, coat. As for 22yo Cookie, our beloved PPID gypsy coblet, she's been growing her thick winter coat for a few weeks now, which made my heart break for her during the heatwave. The spring/autumn coat change has a significant effect on our horses' inner engines - we're talking major overtime for the horse’s two main detoxification organs, the liver and kidneys , as coat change time is when the whole protein metabolism is renewed. Old proteins are degraded and biotransformed for excretion, and new proteins are created, both of which put added pressure on firstly the liver, which has to biotransform (metabolise) the significant degraded protein waste, and for the kidneys which have to excrete all the excess urea created by this higher burden of protein metabolism. The autumn coat change specifically, often accompanied by a change in forage as grass nutrients deplete and hay is reintroduced into the diet, is particularly burdensome on not only these two vital detoxification organs, but also on the lymphatic system, with lymph now overrun with the excess protein toxins. This risks the lymph becoming sluggish, typically presenting as lymph pads over the body, with the coat starting to look pretty rough, and often accompanied by unexpected itchiness and poor quality hooves. Owners can understandably become confused, thinking their horse is laying down fat, when it’s actually stagnating lymph building up all over the body. See our LKL-CARE which is blended specifically to support liver, kidneys and lymphatics. Also useful is our WildFed blend, either added to the feedbowl or sprinkled over hay, which adds beneficial, natural nutrient diversity to their feed regime. The winter coat has a very clear energy-saving function, giving horses their thick winter protection until the nights begin to warm up again. However, this can be difficult for our older horses, as they tend to hold onto their winter coat for longer as we head into spring. If you’re seeing clear early markers for kidney issues, i.e. poor coat quality, thrush-y hooves or abscesses/WLD, or general immunity issues, then this might also a good time to consider a full-body detox with our OptimaCARE programme, which comes as a 3-stage protocol, stage-1 addressing hindgut function, stage-2 for the liver/kidneys, and stage-3 toning both circulatory systems, namely blood and lymphatics. Equally, if your horse has similar prolonged issues that never seem to clear up, they may very well be a KPU candidate - have a read of our KPU page to see if any of the symptoms resonate with you. Sulphur deficiency Sulphur is needed for the formation of keratin, which forms the new hair. Sulphur deficiency is difficult to identify in blood tests, but we can visibly see the presentations of sulphur deficiency in skin, hair and hooves, because sulphur is needed wherever we're talking skin, hair and hooves. If your horse is prone to eczema or mud fever, or you notice their mane or tail thinning, or they're struggling to grow a decent winter coat or shedding it in spring, this could well be a sign of sulphur deficiency. As for hooves, they’re built from keratin which is high in sulphur, so deficiencies will present at slower hoof growth, weak/soft soles, footiness, or poor hoof capsules – all likely to be a sulphur deficiency, and all kidney markers. It's now also thought that horses with chronic respiratory also have an undiagnosed sulphur deficiency. We sell sulphur as MSM (methylsulfonylmethane). Long and short, it’s always a good plan to support liver/kidney function as we head into autumn and spring as these vital detoxification organs have to work extra hard when the coat changes. Originally published 13.9.22

When it comes to bone health they're all connected

I’ve been having a variety of interesting email chats recently regarding feeding minerals, with differing opinions coming from all angles. Some positive, some unsure of the benefits, others convinced their horse gets ‘everything they need’ from their forage but still wanting to hear why they should be fed. With different views and different science news coming out by the day from highly respected equine professionals, I get the confusion. Dr Christina Fritz’s ‘Feed Your Horse Fit’ course content last year added valuable new science to the mineral-balancing jigsaw, with one of the standouts being about the effects of feeding synthetic minerals to our horses, and that synthetic selenium may also cause subclinical toxicity. A year on and now we now have Dr Kellon telling us not to 'fear selenium’, and suggesting that if we’re concerned about it, maybe consider blood testing. Yet Dr Fritz says that selenium levels can only rarely be detected via blood tests. We all have our equine gurus that we personally swear by; our preferred farriers, vets, nutritionists, body workers et al, all with differing opinions and science, and yet I hear too often from people feeling like they’re caught between a rock and a hard place when their vet says one thing and their farrier says another. It's also sometimes not that easy to explain the benefits, to give some clarity, because we have to get a bit science-y with it - I can still clearly remember the agony of chemistry lessons at school – I couldn’t relate to them at all because I needed a ‘story’, the How&Why, and not just a times-table of facts and figures. So yes, I get it, and having once trained in salesmanship around 4-centuries ago, I learned a very useful catch-phrase – “Telling isn’t selling.” You can’t sell a concept/product by telling someone only about the features, i.e. this bottle has a flat bottom. You have to turn those features into benefits, what it's going to mean to the client, or as the salesmanship saying goes, the WIIFM’s – 'What’s In It For Me’, using the phrase "which means", i.e. this bottle has a flat bottom which means ... it'll stand up. As for selling the concept of why someone should feed minerals to their horse, I can tell anyone that feeding magnesium to their horse helps balance calcium, but how does this benefit their horse? What's the ‘ which means … ’? In this particular case it means their horse may seem calmer (because of the healthy chemical cellular exchange, although it's always going to be much bigger science-y picture 😉). So. Back to those recent e-chats and Ding! I had a lightbulb moment - how about if I tried a different tack ? How about I explained how minerals benefitted us humans versus how a deficiency caused us to feel - maybe my clients could relate more to that and it would paint a clearer picture? Cut a very long one short, it worked. What also helped was that I’ve recently finished reading a fairly impressive monster of a book - ‘The Mineral Fix - How to Optimise Your Mineral Intake for Energy, Longevity, Immunity, Sleep and More’. Yes I know, a bit nerdy, but this kind of thing floats my nerdy boat. Written by Dr. James DiNicolantonio, a well-respected and internationally known scientist, and the author/co-author of over 250 publications in the medical literature, he’s also a Doctor of Pharmacy, and an expert on health and nutrition. He also just happens to be connected to the Institute of Functional Medicine , which is My Thing (medicine by cause, not symptoms), so this also floats my nerdy Functional Medicine boat as well 😉 And when it comes to mineral deficiencies, in his opinion Dr James considers our modern day’s lack of human nutrition in our diets as a potential pandemic. So, I leaned very heavily on his book to put together my all-things-human-minerals to our clients. And … as is my way, the more I got involved in cross-referencing the human mineral story to our horses, you’ve guessed it - I felt a Carol-Ramble blog coming on … So, here it is, and it's one heck of a story. Hope it makes some sort of sense to you. 😉 How common mineral deficiencies impact health 🤓Mini Science Alert!🤓 If we start at the very beginning, in our human bodies, we are one big engine of chemistry. Every second of every day, there are 37-billion-billion chemical reactions (yes you read that right) happening inside our bodies. And each and every one of these chemical reactions needs enzymes to occur, and guess what those enzymes need to do their job - minerals. TaDah! So there are the facts, the features, but what are the WIIFMs? Big picture, this means minerals have an enormous impact on our health, whether horse or human. But … and also whether horse or human, we’re seeing an epidemic of mineral deficiencies, in an age of over-nutrition courtesy of our old friends - starch and sugar, alongside an epidemic level of under-nutrition of these absolutely essential mineral nutrients. It’s easy to think that minerals are just not really that important, or that we can easily get them from our food, or we’re not really that deficient. I mean - how could we be deficient? We’re such a well-nourished country - just look at the high obesity levels; we are far from a starved nation. But … there’s also the phenomenon that the more obese we are, the more nutrient-deficient we are. It’s remarkable to see this paradox of obesity and malnutrition going together. If you’ve ever wondered how we got here, as to why we’re all so low in minerals, the same factors relate to us both - horse and human again. And one thing’s for sure – modern-day industrial agriculture has a whole lot to do with it, but so does chronic illness (brought on by the nutritional imbalances) and the medications that we all then have to take as a result, as well as insulin resistance and inflammation – something we can all relate to when it comes to our horses. The problem is compounded. These days there are less minerals in our food than there used to be, due to modern farming practices using chemicals like glyphosate and post-harvest sprays (carrots these days have 75% less magnesium than 50-years ago). Then that food gets ultra-processed (aka CRAP - Carbs, Refined, Artificial and Processed) then plastic-wrapped before landing on our supermarket shelves. Now factor in pharma drugs and inflammatory, sedentary lifestyles, and collectively they all contribute to depleting our bodies even further of what minerals we can get from our food. Same for our horses here in the UK. Their food – neon-green uber-starch/sugar-rich grass, of which they eat far too much of, is then fed alongside their own ultra-processed CRAP feeds, sprayed with those same chemicals then squished into shiny plastic feedbags, together with pharma drugs and inflammatory lifestyles depleting their bodies even further of what minerals they can get from their food. Even if we do our level best to get us - and our horses – real food, if it’s not grown on a regenerative no-spray farm we can pretty much guarantee four main minerals are depleted - magnesium, phosphorous, copper and zinc. It’s no coincidence that these are the four main deficient minerals in our horses, and the four main minerals you'll see in any decent equine mineral forage-balancer, including our EquiVita/VitaComplete mineral balancer range . When we generally think about ‘food’ for our horses, we probably think more about fibre and protein, and we might talk about minerals, but most of us don’t recognise how mineral-deficient our horses are. And no surprise because there’s nowhere near the amount of research done on equine health compared to human health, where the stats for us humans alone estimate that one in three of us are deficient in at least 10 minerals, and this is insufficient deficient. Back to Dr. James, and to quote him, “ It really started around 1940. There are three primary reasons why most of us are actually deficient in minerals. The number one reason is the foods that we eat are now just simply more nutrient-depleted compared to 50 to 80 years ago, because of how we grow our food. The second reason is 60% of our calories come from processed foods - flour, sugar (aka the white menace) and seed oils, the processing of which essentially eliminates 80-100% of the minerals in those products. Then the third factor is that the majority of adults have at least one chronic health condition, that condition depleting the body of minerals, and the medications used to treat those disease states further depleting the body of minerals. ” So: 1. The way we grow our food today means less nutrient content . 2. Processing food further eliminates 80-100% of the mineral content. 3. Continually eating carb-rich, refined, artificial, processed food creates chronic health conditions which further depletes the body’s mineral levels. 4. The pharma meds needed to support those chronic conditions also further deplete the body of minerals. This means there’s a whole Big-Picture effect on the body’s biology which eventually shows up clinically as symptoms, and if not addressed, those symptoms will lead to disease. So, let's delve deeper. Why is our soil less nutritious than it was 50 years ago, and what does it have to do with the way we grow feed crops on it? (Quick apology up front to all veggies/vegans out there, which for the record include me ...) Two main reasons why. First up, we now grow food for yield, so essentially we’re growing plants and animals quicker. These days our crops are chemically sprayed during the growth period and/or genetically modified for a faster turnround and harvest. As for our meat animals, they’re slaughtered much earlier than before, i.e. cattle are being slaughtered at 14-months instead of at 2-3yo. This all basically means that the animal or plant simply don’t have the time to actually take up all the nutrients from the soil, meaning they’re literally more diluted in nutrition. Second, it’s about the phosphorus fertilisers that are being used that inhibits the uptake of numerous minerals. Using raspberries as an example, clinical studies have shown that using phosphorous fertilisers decreases the raspberry’s calcium, magnesium, boron and zinc levels by 30% each. Farming is shifting away from regenerative to mono-cropping yield-increasing, and it’s led to nutritional dilutions – not to mention loss of flavour - compared to 50-60-years ago. Aside from this – and important when it comes to our horses – because of the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the plants are absorbing it, with the end result causing them to become more starchy and less nutritious, with less protein and minerals. And with the soil having been damaged by all these chemical fertilisers, fungicides, pesticides, herbicides and glyphosate, the soil’s microbiome is destroyed, which kills off the symbiotic relationship between the soil microbes and the plant - it’s the job of the microbes and the organic matter in the soil to extract the nutrients from the soil and put in the plant. Which means ... even if the soil’s full of nutrients, if there’s no organic matter or microbes in the soil, the plant can’t get access to those nutrients. Fortified with artificials (aka, an expensive way to make urine …) So, we now have nutrient-deficient food being ‘processed’ en-masse, with 60% of the calories having been deliberately stripped of all of its nutrients due to the chemical processes during the growth period. So how do the BigFood corporations get round this? They fortify this non-food with artificial, made-in-a-lab vitamin and mineral premixes to compensate (Top TIp - check on the back of your feedbag to see if there’s a vit/min premix included 😏). And, as before, being synthetic, this means the liver won’t recognise these fake vitamins/minerals in order to biotransform/metabolise them for the body to then utilise. Instead, the liver sends these imposters straight to the kidneys for excretion. To repeat, “An expensive way to make urine …” An interesting digress – ever heard of rice ‘polishing’? It’s basically a process by which the outer layers of a grain of rice (the bran) is ‘polished’, aka milled off. Yep, I know – begs the question ‘Why?’ But back in the 70s some numpty thought this would be a good idea, and what followed was a vitamin deficiency – remove the bran, remove the nutrients. The problems were first identified when this polished rice was given to chickens in european prisons; said chooks were then fed to the prisoners who subsequently all got really sick with vitamin deficiencies. And … this crazy process still happens today! These days both rice and flour has to be enriched. Bonkers! Why not ditch the processing part, and provide the whole actual foodstuff with all the nutrients still in it? Loss of copper’s also been a main contender. Vegetables have lost around 75% of their copper, with meat losing on average around 50%. 80-90% of copper is lost in cheese, and we’ve lost almost all of it in milk. The only way to make a beneficial difference to the nutrient density of food is by sourcing crops and animal products from regenerative farms where the farmers use natural manure, and not these phosphorus, artificial NPK fertilisers and bluddy glyphosate. Cue chronic conditions So, we’re feeding ourselves this chemically-soaked, artificially fortified, ultra-processed fake junk and no surprise, this significantly damages our gut microbiome so we end up with chronic diseases, which then need medications to block the symptoms. And so continues the domino-effect cascade of mineral depletion. Human stats show 6 out of 10 people have one chronic disease, with 4 out of 10 having more than one, and here’s scary – a huge 81% of people aged over 50 are on one or more medications. So, let’s look at how this affects the body’s mineral status. First up, all those pharma meds further damage the microbiome, some completely annihilating it, and as we well know, a damaged microbiome means what's left of the friendly gut microbes won't be able to assimilate then absorb the nutrients effectively. In humans this means gluten intolerance, celiac disease, Crohn’s, IBS, ulcerative colitis, acidosis, SIBO, leaky gut, autoimmune syndrome. Take away the gluten intolerance and celiac/Crohn’s, and our horses are prone to all the rest. Here's another thing. Even if the GI tract could absorb the nutrients, it then requires insulin to drive numerous minerals into the cells, including magnesium and potassium. Here’s more human stats - these days a whopping 75% of humans are insulin resistant, with high levels of insulin in the bloodstream shifting magnesium and calcium straight out in the urine. Now how many of our horses are insulin resistant? Thousands upon thousands … Long and short this means the body can’t even get these essential minerals into the cells when it’s insulin resistant, and when insulin levels are elevated, this means there’ll be no magnesium and calcium either because they get wee’d out. So basically, if our horses feast on sugary starchy neon-green grass and their insulin levels whomp upwards, they’ll be weeing out vital magnesium before it's even had a chance to be driven to the cells, let alone utilised. Let’s recap. Deficient soils mean mineral-deficient foods that are then processed into fake foods which need to be artificially fortified , which damage the gut microbiome , ultimately creating chronic diseases , so we take medications which further damage the gut microbiome which directly disrupts the nutrient absorption into the bloodstream. Cue one nutrient-deficient, very sick, body. The human pharma med effects How many of us have seen a warning on an innocent supplement advising us not to take it if we’re on X meds because it may interfere with blablabla? Don’t take fish oil if you’re on Coumadin, or don’t take vitamin E if you’re on blood thinner. Well, never mind those contra warnings on nutrient drug interactions - the opposite is also true - drug nutrient interactions! Medications themselves can cause massive nutritional deficiencies, whether it’s an acid blocker causing B12, zinc, magnesium and calcium deficiency, leading to osteoporosis, depression, cognitive impairment and neuropathy. Or certain antidepressants causing B6 deficiency, or diuretics causing magnesium deficiency. Let’s stay with diuretics, as this is incredibly relevant for most of us aged over 50. We’re talking high blood pressure , a chronic age-related disease that many of us are familiar with – me included. And there's a tiny bit of irony involved here, because we're prescribed a diuretic for blood pressure, and it causes us to lose magnesium. Yet what’s the cause of high blood pressure? Low magnesium. Here's the How&Why. One of the first meds a doctor will throw at someone with high blood pressure is something called a thiazide diuretic, a drug that increases urine flow, i.e. Hydrochlorothiazide or Chlorthalidone. Thing is, they also cause potassium loss, so to get round this, the medical community consider that to counter this potassium depletion they can simply prescribe more potassium. Just for the record, for heart failure they have to give us extra potassium because it's known that the heart meds cause potassium to leach out in the urine. Back to high blood pressure, and it’s actually a magnesium depletion that these thiazide diuretics are causing, which makes the body unable to hold onto potassium. Which means, 80% of people who are on a thiazide diuretic for six months or longer are deficient in magnesium. That’s a massive Eighty-Percent. And … these diuretics are one of the most prescribed medications in the western world. It’s said that 50% of people with high blood pressure or heart disease have a magnesium deficiency, with at least half the population not even getting the RDA of magnesium. (Quick digress - the RDA is the absolute minimum amount we need to prevent deficiency diseases, and not how much we need for optimal health. As in, the absolute minimum vit.C we need so we don’t get scurvy, or the absolute minimum vit.D for rickets. The RDA isn't the amount the body needs for optimal functioning - it doesn't match the optimal intake for nutrients. More often than not, if we don’t hit optimal intakes for nutrients, this may be just as damaging to the body.) What makes this all the more ironic is that it's magnesium itself that lowers blood pressure, so we’re kind of getting rid of the very mineral that we need to keep our blood vessels relaxed and not have high blood pressure. In fact, this is what women are given when they have high blood pressure during pregnancy (known as pre-eclampsia), with the treatment being intravenous magnesium. Another magnesium factor; it prevents calcium from accumulating in the arteries. One sign of mineral deficiency is coronary artery calcification, with some doctors now starting to use magnesium instead of simply going by cholesterol tests. Essentially magnesium is nature’s calcium channel blocker; it prevents the endothelial cells that line the arteries from accumulating calcium. Another example of getting the mineral ratio balances right - it’s not just about the overall amount of minerals we’re getting, it’s the balance between them. Another common medication is an old favourite of mine - Proton Pump Inhibitors , aka PPIs (if you’ve ever contacted me regarding your horse’s stomach ulcers , you’ll no doubt have been on the receiving end of one of my PPI rants 🤬). PPIs are prescription acid-suppressing therapies, well known in our horse world as they're the vets' go-to for stomach ulcers, plus us humans also have antacids available to us sold over the counter. Trivia time – in our human world PPIs are a leading class of drugs; after statins and antidepressants, PPIs are the third leading class of drugs. If we have heartburn or reflux, most doctors will throw these at us. We’re not really supposed to be on them for longer than two to three months at the most, yet most people are prescribed these for years. And no surprise … gradually the medical world started noticing that long-term PPI users were becoming deficient in numerous minerals, particularly magnesium. These days? There’s now a black box warning on (human) PPI’s advising that taking PPI’s can lead to magnesium deficiency. An actual black box warning that a pharmacist has to apply that says if you take this medication, stuff is going to happen to you. In other words, a bit of a big deal. Another old favourite - high cholesterol . If we're on statins for cholesterol (for years, mind), it blocks the enzyme that makes CoQ10. CoQ10 is necessary for our mitochondrial function, so our energy, our longevity, our vitality, is depleted - we don't have any of this without the mitochondria. If we're on statins we're gumming up our mitochondria so our body will struggle to produce energy, which is why our muscles hurt. But when our muscles hurt without exercising, because of a drug, it’s because we're depleting the energy in the cell with a drug that blocks a key compound, CoQ10, which is essential to make energy. Thing is, to lower cholesterol - and I'm talking the bad small-particle LDL cholesterol - we could take any drug in the world but if we're not going to change our diet and get rid of the starch and sugar, it’s not going to get fixed. The reason our LDL particles are small is because we have pre-diabetes. So, fix the pre-diabetes and reverse it with lifestyle and exercise, and it’s going to work way better. Do a 10-day detox, do some exercise and be amazed at what happens. Another study of note was where a group of women were put on a diet that contained just 100-milligrams of magnesium – a tiny amount by any stretch. Within just a few weeks, a third of those women developed atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter , showing that arrhythmia could be induced simply by lowering the magnesium content of the diet. This has since been seen with numerous nutrients and is really concerning. And lest we forget, mineral losses also occur through sweat. Original copper studies testing for the RDA looked at just urine and stool copper loss, yet failed to show daily losses of 0.3mg of copper through sweat, before sweat was finally included in the tests as well. And just for fun, low copper levels have been shown to induce high cholesterol, high triglycerides, and our old favourite - insulin resistance. All common issues that would be induced with a high starch/sugar diet, but also induced by not consuming enough copper. Something we can definitely relate to our horses’ health. Which links us nicely to: Insulin Resistance, aka Pre-Diabetes The drug Metformin has also been in the news recently - Metformin is medicine's No.1 go-to medicine for pre-diabetes, and also our vets' No.1 drug when our horses are diagnosed EMS/IR, and when it comes to being prescribed for our horses, it's eye-wateringly expensive. A quick digress - our bodies have nutrient-sensing pathways that regulate our ability to actually build and grow new tissue or to clean up and recycle. Metformin acts on one of these nutrient and pathways - called AMPK - by switching it on, which is a good thing because it helps improve blood sugar control. But - new science is now showing Metformin is no silver bullet, so we should really be paying attention to the science of how we can regulate these pathways without pharma medication. Specifically, CNN have recently reported that men’s use of Metformin just before conception is linked to a 40% increase in birth defects. As in, a 40% rise in birth defects directly linked to the biological male parent taking the drug. There's still a lot that we don’t know so this still needs a deeper dig into, but there's also a huge study showing compliance and results for diabetes - a publicly funded trial, and not funded by the drug companies (always a good thing) - which looked at Metformin v. placebo v. people who were given lifestyle coaching with exercise and taught how to cook from scratch instead of buying junk ready-meals. No surprise - the group that did the best was the latter. It's really simple - upswitch lifestyle basics and there's evidence out there showing we don't need this drug. If we have more of an understand about the body's natural pathway intelligence, we'll learn that the pathways that these drugs act on are not drug-receptor pathways. These pathways are the body's way of listening, like a satellite dish, listening to the communications from our lifestyle and our environment. This is how these pathways are activated - naturally, evolved over millenia and before plastic-wrapped ultra-processed junk food. The answer? Phytochemical-rich food alongside exercise, both factors that the body has naturally done as part of evolution that it's completely adapted to. Immune Health As for immune health , and we all know that zinc and selenium are extremely important, yet simply being deficient in selenium can essentially turn non-virulent viruses into something that could potentially kill us. There’s a fascinating study on COVID in China where they looked at areas where there was high selenium in the soil versus low selenium, where people were tending to be deficient in selenium. These selenium-deficient people had a 3-times higher risk of ending up in hospital, a dramatic difference between the adequate and the deficient selenium groups. And this is just one mineral. More on COVID further on. Now let’s move to brain health . So many issues relating to sleep, anxiety, mood disorders, depression, are literally being driven by mineral deficiencies. If we want to create the two feel-good neurotransmitters in the brain, i.e. serotonin and dopamine, the enzymes to create these require magnesium, zinc, calcium, iron and copper. These enzymes are also responsible for our sleep pattern, converting tryptophan to serotonin then melatonin, yet if we suffer from insomnia most doctors won’t even look or test for a mineral deficiency. They simply give us a script for sleeping pills and benzodiazapines, which as we know can lead to addiction … So why don’t we test? The problem is that mineral deficiencies are very tricky to test, with part of the problem being that some minerals are what are called acute phase reactants, meaning if there’s inflammation in the body (which there will be if the body's sick), the levels of those minerals will either go up or down, depending on the inflammation. For example, if the body’s inflamed, zinc, selenium and iron will go down. On the flip side, inflammation will increase copper levels, so you might already be deficient in copper but the inflammation will drive the levels up because it’s an acute phase reactant. The other problem is that most minerals don’t stay in the blood; they’re mostly in the soft tissue or bone, so if we take magnesium as an example, just 1% of the entire body’s magnesium is actually in the blood. 99% is elsewhere, and of course no GP is going to take a bone or soft-tissue sample to test for a magnesium deficiency. So, how can we actually look for mineral deficiencies? Dr James says it’s really about looking to see if a blood test shows at the lower end of normal. With mineral deficiencies we don’t typically fall below the normal threshold unless we’re significantly deficient; if we’re sitting on that lower end of normal, especially if we have a low amount coming out in the urine, this could be indicative of mineral deficiency. Of course in the real world all we hear is, you’ve got high cholesterol, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, so here’s this pill, this pill and this pill, then we’re sent on our way. We could always try hair analysis; it’s not perfect, but it holds a 3-month reflection of blood, so it’s potentially a better way to spot various mineral deficiencies. Premature aging versus longevity These days there are many fad diets for energy and longevity focusing on macronutrients, i.e. carbs versus fats and high carb/low carb, yet it’s actually our mineral levels that determine how well our body converts those macronutrients into ATP energy , and how well our muscles perform. Everything is dependent on it – weight loss isn’t about calories; it’s the fat burning machinery that depends on minerals to function. Someone might be eating a low calorie diet, but this will be nutrient-deficient. We’ll lose more weight by improving our mineral intake than someone eating less-nourishing calories, because the fat burning machinery will actually work better. Again good old magnesium is vital here, as the body can’t activate ATP without magnesium - it binds to ATP then releases it, as well as producing protein, DNA, RNA. There’s not a single function in the body that doesn’t work without ATP and protein and DNA, so literally everything depends on minerals, and especially magnesium. Is salt the enemy? A quick nip back to high blood pressure. We’re taught that we shouldn’t have too much salt because it (allegedly) causes high blood pressure, yet Dr. James challenges this whole hypothesis of salt being the enemy that we thought it was. Apparently it’s sugar and refined carbs that cause our body to over-retain salt, so we need to cut back on the refined carbs and sugar. We also need to make sure we’re getting enough magnesium and enough potassium, as mentioned earlier. Provided we get this balance right, only 1% of the population would probably have a significant rise in blood pressure with a normal salt intake. In other words, it’s not the salt. This is a relatively easy fix as well. We get magnesium and potassium from vegetables and plant foods, then when we cut out starch and sugar, the body starts to dump huge amounts of salt. However, one tiny point - we need to keep up the salt intake, otherwise we may experience negative side effects such as feeling achy, tired, wiped out - essentially like having electrolyte depletion. It’s not because our body’s doing something wrong; it’s because before when we were having all this sugar and starch, our body was holding on to all the salt, then suddenly it's dumping fluid and salt (which is a good thing) but we have to make sure we’re getting adequate salt while we’re doing this, because if we don’t we’re going to feel like crap, so it’s really important if you're switching your diet around to understand this. The same thing happens with what’s commonly referred to as Keto Flu. We go Keto, we cut out carbs, then we get flu-like symptoms, all because of the mineral depletion from the dumping of the salt once we lower insulin levels after we cut out the starch and sugar. That said, there are people who are salt-sensitive or have salt-sensitive hypertension, but typically this will be because their dietary potassium and magnesium is already very low, and they continue to eat high amounts of carbs and sugars. Change the diet and you’ll very likely find blood pressure coming down, and before long we’re weaning ourselves off the meds. So, eat a banana for potassium, and also make a big vegetable soup, chuck in a bit of seaweed if you can stomach it, and there’s your potassium and extra minerals. And … getting a normal salt intake is actually one of the best ways to reduce sugar cravings – it’s a natural survival mechanism, and our horses know it too. The body craves salt if it’s depleted which triggers the reward centre in the brain to hyper-activated, so it will naturally head for salt. However, if we don’t get enough salt, the hyper reward center will take what it can get so long as there’s a dopamine response, so it’ll be happy with sugar, or any other type of addictive substance to release the dopamine 'happy', so there's another factor - low salt can literally drive sugar addiction. The COVID connection Let’s flick back to COVID, and it’s clear that minerals play a role in the prevention, and even treatment, of COVID. One huge factor for me was that the government recommendations didn’t include any guidelines for us to upgrade our nutrition, or improve the quality of our food, or to take any nutrient supplements. Not sure if anyone remembers but I thought it was interesting when Trump was hospitalised for COVID, and the news reported that he was given zinc and vitamin D. Practicing it in the hospital, but not telling us regular folk to do this, when they knew doing this might help. In his book Dr. James puts together a useful chart on the top nutrient deficiencies and how much they increase the risk of having a poor outcome from COVID, with the top nutrient deficiency being vitamin D. The chart shows that if someone was significantly vitamin D deficient they were at a 15-fold higher risk of dying from COVID. As well as vit.D, both selenium and zinc sit somewhere between a 3/5-fold higher risk of having a poor COVID outcome. So why weren’t we all told this? Zinc plays a huge role in immunity - personally, whenever I feel the first effects of something viral invading my body, I dive on zinc citrate as it has a direct anti-viral effect in reducing viral replication and penetration into the cell. (And Oregano-Oil as well 😉). Our old friend magnesium is also one of the most important antiviral minerals because the ionic magnesium in immune cells actually controls their receptors to be able to attack viruses. Collectively zinc, magnesium and selenium are vital for antioxidant functions. Basically the body makes its own natural, very powerful antioxidant system – i.e. glutathione, superoxide dismutase, catalase – which are way more powerful than any antioxidant we can take via a supplement, but in order for them to function they need the right levels of specific minerals to function. To conclude Given that we’re more nutrition-deficient than ever, especially with COVID also exposing that we’re under-nourished of real nutrients. It won’t hurt to pay attention to our mineral intake. Minerals are so critical to our biology - by tweaking our nutrition naturally, even in small amounts, can have really profound effects, whether human or horse. I’ve seen first-hand with my own horses that feeding our EquiVita range of balanced minerals in their diet over the last 10-years has been one of the most powerful factors in improving their overall well-being and health, and many of our clients concur. And because we don’t use any synthetic minerals in the composition, it’s also all been without making expensive urine 😉 Improving the nutrient-rich human diet If you're interested from a human perspective, and want to know how to Improve your own nutrient-rich diet, here’s Dr James' guide on how to increase our mineral intake. First up, another apology to the veggies/vegans out there but it’s red meat . But not just any old red meat. True ancestral meat, i.e. bison/venison, has around 50% more minerals than grass-fed cattle. If we’re not getting even a little bit of red meat in our diet, it’s going to be difficult to get B12, protein, zinc and iron, because these four nutrients are packed in animal foods. That said, these days we don’t typically eat true ‘fresh’ meat, so we’ve diminished our natural vit.C sources simply by buying supermarket meats which have been hanging for 2-3 weeks, which have a whole lot less vit.C than fresh meat. The key is to try to eat as fresh as possible when we can. We also do well with just 30g of liver per day for copper, folate and vit.A, as well as liver being a great source of vit.C – 100g of apple provides 7mg vit.C whereas 30g liver provides 27mg – some call liver a seriously powerful superfood. Once we have our red meat sorted, then we can start adding plant foods into our diet. Plant foods are really great for things like potassium, magnesium and calcium. Many of us are deficient in these three, but the dark greens, i.e. kale, spinach, broccoli, are super-high in them, with magnesium also high in beans and nuts. Some fish have a decent amount of magnesium, lobster and crab particularly. We can get folates and vit.A from eggs , which are also a source of vitamin D, pretty much the only dietary source of vitamin D. They’re also good sources of lutein, zeaxanthin and omega-3. To recap, and unless you’re a veggie/vegan, eat eggs, some red meat, 30g liver per day, then add in plant foods for magnesium, potassium and calcium, and don’t forget nuts and seeds - selenium is high in Brazil nuts with pumpkin seeds high in protein and zinc. Seaweed and fish gives us iodine if we need it, and calcium from chia and sesame seeds/tahini. By understanding where our nutrients come from, we can start to build a more nutrient dense diet, but is this enough? If we’re eating our 3 brazil nuts and 17 pumpkins seeds each day, and we’ve made all these great dietary changes that help us upgrade our mineral intake, do we still need to be taking supplements? At the end of the day it all comes down to the difference between the RDA and the optimal intake. What’s interesting is that us humans only need around 150mg magnesium to live per day, but the optimal intake sits more at around 700mg. Generally it’s a 3-fold difference between just maintaining balance and having optimal mineral intakes, so, if we’re building our diet appropriately and hitting optimum nutrient intakes, we shouldn’t need to supplement. Originally posted 12.5.22

Different horse breeds/types mean different microbiomes/metabolisms, and can shed a whole new light on gut function, especially with an imported horse. These days, perhaps when we look at a horse we should try to take into account what their dominant type is, to be mindful of their potential metabolism and microbiome type.

- aka the Spring Grass Effect

A common enquiry I get from clients in winter is that their horse is lacking energy, or worse is in a state of chronic fatigue. Apparently in our human world around 30% of all doctor visits are due to exhaustion and/or chronic fatigue. ‘Energy’ comes from the body making what we call ATP, aka Adenosine Triphosphate - ATP is a molecule of energy made when the body breathes oxygen and eats food, which then gets metabolised in the body’s cells’ tiny mitochondria. Whether horse or human it’s a common problem, and very often related to lifestyle and habits which either drive energy, or don’t. So, how do we increase the production of ATP and improve the body’s mitochondrial function? What zaps it, and how can we get more of it? Let's talk all-things-energy, and first go through a few things that we often associate with what causes energy to diminish. First up, adrenaline and cortisol , the two major stress hormones, are usually triggered during fight/flight to ‘wire’ the senses when there’s a stress response in the body. All well and good when they’re needed, but when everything calms back down, the body becomes depleted with something called adenosine in the mitochondria, which causes the body to biologically crash with fatigue. So, short term high followed by the body feeling wiped-out-tired and a crash of low energy. Hence why keeping stressors down is so important. Second, quality rest/sleep . As humans we know if we don’t sleep, the body becomes tired and wired at the same time. Lack of quality rest/sleep weakens the immune system making the body prone to illness and impairing the body’s ability to fight it off. It also has a negative impact on heart health, is associated with higher rates of cancer, and leads to major cognition issues, having a direct impact on learning and memory. Finally, our old friend sugar . Like caffeine, the body gets an immediate short burst of energy from sugar, and then it crashes – us humans have all experienced this after a major cake fix, or a can of Coke. So, sugar is another No if we want to keep energy levels even all day, but not so easy when it comes to our horses and the constant battle to keep their sugar levels low. Which links us nicely to blood sugar levels , and how blood sugar is completely connected to energy levels going up and down throughout the day, with the body on a rollercoaster of energy/crash/refuel, rinse and repeat. Cue the weight gain/fatigue/mood-change cycle alongside all kinds of other health complications. Sugar.Is.Really.Mean. Now we introducing the Glycemic Load, and here’s a thing - this is about eating a little bit of fat, protein or fibre, for example, instead of eating just berries on an empty stomach. Yes, fruit contains many amazing phytonutrients and polyphenols, but - if we eat a ton of fruit on an empty stomach, that’ll completely upset our blood sugar versus if we have it at the end of a meal where we've had some healthy fat, protein or fibre. The glycemic load is basically about what the total composition of a meal does to the blood sugar. So, if we add in fat or protein or fibre, these act like a sponge and slows the sugar absorption. By preventing the spikes, this lessens the insulin surges, so no blood sugar crashes. And so it all evens out. Which is why, for our horses, it’s so important for them to eat hay all year round, as the hay stalks are where the vital, hindgut-essential, fibre is. Let’s hop back into our human-world for a moment. Fatigue is obviously a catch-all basket of symptoms that doesn’t really specifically denote a particular disease, but it can depend on the fatigue. In conventional medical practice it’s normal to look for common factors such as thyroid issues, certain vitamin deficiencies like B12, or something chronic going on below like heart disease or cancer. However, more often than not our GP’s won’t find much, so very often they’ll simply say we’re depressed and tell us we need Prozac. However, if we look at it another way, i.e. the world of Functional Medicine, we really only need to ask two questions to learn pretty much everything we need to know: First, what is it that’s bothering the body’s system? What is it that we need to get rid of, so the body can function properly? What is it that’s causing the imbalance? Second, what does the body need to thrive? That it needs more of? Rest, or minerals? So what’s the list that I go through in my mind when a client contacts me? I look at the major factors that are the cause of almost all imbalances in the body, and with a bit of consideration towards genetics thrown in, as follows: 1. Diet - poor nutrition plays a huge role in lack of energy – gut-inappropriate foods do not ATP fuel make. 2. Stress - whether physical or psychological stress - emotional stress, including past traumas, can contribute enormously to zapping energy, as mental stress causes huge changes in the brain chemistry and metabolism, and leads to overwhelming fatigue. 3. Allergens - what’s inflaming the body? Are there food allergens/sensitivities or an environmental allergen such as pollens? 4. What about toxins ? Anything and everything from environmental toxins, moulds, pesticides, heavy metals, internal toxins, metabolic toxins ... the list goes on. 5. Finally, microbes - not just the gut or skin microbiome, but also pathogen bacteria, which are a huge cause of chronic fatigue syndrome, i.e. Lyme disease. It’s really about looking at the Big Picture, the overall symptomatic presentations, looking for clues about what’s really driving the fatigue. Is it nutrient depletion? A microbiome issue? An infection? A hormonal imbalance? Some kind of stress? What’s behind it all? Either way, we generally follow the Alleviate, Detox & Fortify protocol, which involves taking out the bad stuff – ultra-processed food, poor rest/sleep, excess stress, lack of movement, too much sugar - and putting in good stuff, i.e. a clean diet to get rid of all the inflammatory foods, and a detox . Fortifying with nutrients to replace any mineral deficiencies , and gentle exercise to get everything moving again. Really simple changes can make a huge difference - focusing on balancing sugar/starch levels and doing a detox is essentially an amazing way to recalibrate metabolism, brain chemistry, and energy. Long and short, fatigue comes from mitochondria damage. Mitochondria, the energy factories in each and every cell, produce the ATP energy that runs everything in the body. They’re critical for everything in the body to function, and for aging and longevity. Fuel them wrong and we have elevated muscle enzymes, meaning the muscle cells are damaged. We also have a damaged metabolism, a damaged immune system, brain and hormones. Fuel them wrong and we’re looking at far-reaching effects across the body that basically screws everything up. So if you’re looking to get your horse back to being like the Energizer bunny, we need to burn clean fuel, so we can create and repair the energy systems in the body – the mitochondria. However – everything starts with the gut, and every horse, every human, is different – it’s called biochemical individuality. Two people eat an apple, yet it can be a different experience for each of them once they eat it. Some are creating huge spikes in insulin, others aren’t, yet they can have very different responses. How? Why? Look first at the microbiome. And let’s not forget about healthy ratios of the Omegas 3-6, which is directly connected to feelings of depression. The horse’s natural diet of grass has an omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid ratio of around 4:1, similar to other browse foods like leaves and buds, with summer growing grass coming in at around 4% fat. This level of intake isn't available all year, hence horses not on fresh, growing grass will have a dietary deficiency of omega-3. Equally, when grass is dried and baled as hay, the fragile omega-3 fatty acids are lost so it has to be supplemented, especially if a horse is on a hay-only diet.  Micronised Linseed comes in at the same omega-3 profile as fresh, growing grass, with blood tests showing that 100g/day of linseed equals the same daily omega-3 intake as a horse on pasture – this applies to the average 500kg horse, so pro-rata it works out at 20g/100kg bodyweight. If your horse is on part grass/part hay (say, overnight), then feed 10g/100kg bodyweight daily. If your horse is on a full hay diet with no grass, or during winter, feed 20g/100kg bodyweight daily. If your horse is permanently on growing grass during the summer, there's no need to feed linseed until winter. To summarise The fundamental factor is that we appreciate that fatigue is a symptom of something else, so we have to become detectives to figure out what’s behind the fatigue. Is it from eating poor-quality food, or not exercising, or not having field buddies to play with, or overloaded with past traumas/stressors? Or is it due to a nutrient deficiency, or Lyme, or toxins? Is it because the microbiome is out of kilter? What’s driving the fatigue? Identify where the bad is, take it out and put good stuff in instead. Alleviate if needed, detox and fortify.

Winter, and we've all seen it - adverse respiratory effects in our horses. What I'm seeing more and more of is clients contacting me because their horse hasn't just got a random cough or respiratory irritation - it's chronic, and has been ongoing for a long time, year in and year out. So I've been studying again to get to the root of all this, and for starters there's no surprise - it all originates from mould, fungi and bacteria that thrive in damp environments, emitting spores, allergens, mycotoxins, endotoxins, and volatile microbial compounds into the air. And even worse for our horses, fungal fragments can stay airborne longer than fungal spores (which are larger) and so they can penetrate deeper into the lungs and deposit themselves there due to their small aerodynamic diameter. ( Seo S, Choung JT, Chen BT, Lindsley WG, Kim KY. The level of submicron fungal fragments. Environ Res. 2014;131:71-76. doi:1016/j.envres.2014.02.015 ) No surprise No. 2 - the longer the body's exposed to these toxins, the longer they weaken the immune system, making it more hypersensitive with an increased susceptibility to infection caused by opportunistic fungi, in other words, the body becomes immunosuppressed. These moulds don't just affect the respiratory system though; we can see it topically as well, usually as some form of bacterial dermatitis issue. However, with the majority of peer-reviewed published research on mould being related to respiratory conditions, and the majority of my enquiries being the same, we'll start here. Allergic Respiratory Diseases Mould, which is a specific type of microscopic fungi, can thrive on just about anything – it can’t digest inorganic materials, i.e. concrete, glass, or metal, but it can digest and grow on the dirt, dust, and organic residue that accumulates on them. We’ve all seen it on stable walls, leather tack we've forgotten to clean, and in our hay - I've just recently had to chuck an entire 4-string bale where rain had got through a protective tarp - that mould was cooking! And very heavy to hump over to the muckheap ... 😒 Dampness and mould hypersensitivity syndrome (DMHS) typically presents with mild to moderate signs of irritation of the respiratory tract and/or the eyes, and if it progresses, it can become chronic, leading to allergic respiratory diseases and infections. Worse, research also suggests that fungi can bind to antibodies, allowing them to be recognised by cells of the innate immune system - the body's first line of defense against germs entering the body - so seriously not good as this can then further aggravate allergic inflammation! ( Conti P, Tettamanti L, Mastrangelo F, et al. Impact of fungi on immune responses. Clin Ther. 2018;40(6):885-888. doi:1016/j.clinthera.2018.04.010 , & Kritas SK, Gallenga CE, D Ovidio C, et al. Impact of mould on mast cell-cytokine immune response. J Biol Regul Homeost Agents. 2018;32(4):763-768 ) And then there’s the mast cell connection - mast cells are allergy cells responsible for immediate allergic reactions. They cause allergic symptoms by releasing products called mediators stored inside them or made by them. When triggered, these mast cells release substances that can cause signs and symptoms similar to those of an allergic reaction and, sometimes, severe inflammation that may result in organ damage. Common triggers that we see in us humans include alcohol, spicy foods, insect stings and certain medications. Mould can activate the immune system directly or through fungal mycotoxins which can also trigger diseases mediated by mast cells, and aggravate allergic hypersensitivity inflammation, i.e. respiratory tract/eye irritation and recurrent chronic cough. Worse, mould can also liberate mycotoxins that may exist on volatile spores and stimulate mast cells to secrete pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines (cytokines - cell signalling proteins involved in modulating the immune system) (chemokenes - large families of cell signalling proteins that stimulate the migration of cells, most notably leukocytes, the body’s vital killer-army of white blood cells that protect the body from infection). How it progresses ... Studies and clinical research suggest that physiological dysfunction may even be associated with the toxins released in damp/water-damaged buildings, including chronic neurological and immunological diseases. Cue our old friend, autoimmunity, and specifically related to the nervous system where it’s thought to be associated with exposure to fungal bioaerosols. The authors of a 2010 study investigated neurological antibodies and neurophysiological abnormalities in patients exposed to moulds who developed symptoms of peripheral neuropathy (numbness, tingling, tremors, and muscle weakness in the extremities). 83% of patients in the study presented with peripheral neuropathy. ( Tuuminen T. The roles of autoimmunity and biotoxicosis in sick building syndrome as a “starting point” for irreversible dampness and mold hypersensitivity syndrome. Antibodies. 2020;9(2):26. doi:3390/antib9020026 & Campbell AW, Thrasher JD, Madison RA, Vojdani A, Gray MR, Johnson A. Neural autoantibodies and neurophysiologic abnormalities in patients exposed to molds in water-damaged buildings. Arch Environ Health. 2003;58(8):464-474. doi:3200/aeoh.58.8.464-474 ) 🤓Science alert!🤓 This same group of patients was also part of another study that demonstrated that mixed mould mycotoxicosis may be implicated in the production of antinuclear autoantibodies and antimyelin antibodies against the nervous system, and autoantibodies against smooth muscles. Collectively, this was referred to as ‘mixed mould mycotoxicosis' for the multisystem illnesses observed in these patients. ( Gray MR, Thrasher JD, Crago R, et al. Mixed mold mycotoxicosis: immunological changes in humans following exposure in water-damaged buildings. Arch Environ Health. 2003;58(7):410-420. doi:1080/00039896.2003.11879142 ) Support Addressing the root cause is obviously about decreasing exposure, but thereafter the body’s ability to detoxify/biotransform and excrete toxic substances is of critical importance to minimise the risks. These days we all know that toxins accumulate in the body and are the cause of numerous health problems - you all know how much I bang on about it all over this website - it's rare that client enquiries don't get a Carol-sermon on all-things-toxins (sorry!) 😏. But we now know how toxins affect the body, where they originate from, and how to improve the body's ability to detoxify in our toxic world. For sure we need to alleviate the symptoms and focus on a healthy gut function to sustain a strong immune system, but supporting the liver and kidneys for their vital biotransformation and excretion role is an essential and critical part in protecting our horses’ health and well-being. Spirulina can help enormously as an excellent natural gut-mycotoxin binder and hindgut deacidifier, especially useful if feeding haylage , fed alongside our LKLCARE liver:kidneys:lymphatics pathway regeneration programme. It's also now thought that chronic, ongoing cough/respiratory dysfunction may be connected to the now widespread, multi-metabolic detoxification disorder known as Cryptopyrroluria, aka KPU. Have a read at our KPU page and see if any of it resonates with you. Meanwhile, to end on a positive testimonial, and in support of spirulina, I had this email in just yesterday from an equine practitioner: Hi Carol, just wanted to let you know that I think we may have found something that works for Archie's scabby feet! He's been prone to some form of dermatitis on his feet on and off since I had him. Sometimes it's worse than others and it usually responds to being gently cleaned off and then treated with a steriod cream I get from the vet. However, since he's been on your Equivita with spirulina , the scabs have all gone. Must be a miracle ingredient because I've tried everything in the past and the only thing that has really helped was paddling in the sea! Anyhow, thought you would like to know! Max

Whether horse or human ...

We already know that exposure to toxins, including environmental chemicals, damages the gut microbiota composition. However, there's now growing evidence that this can also trigger obesity as a result. If there's dysbiosis in the hindgut biome, we now know this affects the production of the vital metabolites needed for biotransformation, i.e. the process by which a substance changes from one chemical to another (transformed) by a chemical reaction within the body. The terms metabolising or metabolic transformations are also frequently used for this vital biotransformation process. So, in short, hindgut dysbiosis affects the critical role of chemical metabolism. Reminder - why are metabolites vital? FIrst up, they're fermentation by-products produced in the hindgut by the beneficial fibre-fermenting gut microbes; they're also known as postbiotics. But before you get science-brain-freeze, don’t panic – we already know these postbiotics. Their official term is 'bioactive compounds', but we know them better as short-chain fatty acids – proprionate, butyrate and acetate, the very source of the horse’s energy. Other vital postbiotics produced by the hindgut biome are certain amino acids and vitamins, particularly two vital B-vits in a specific ‘activated’ form that the equine gut recognises - B12 as methylcobalamin and B6 as pyridoxal-5-phosphate, aka P5P - P5P is absolutely vital for the liver’s natural biotranformation detoxification role; without it, a horse will slide into a now widespread multi-metabolic detoxification disorder known as Cryptopyrroluria, aka KPU , which is a whole other story, although still very much connected. KPU is known as "the disease with a thousand faces" as there’s such a wide range of symptoms, including liver/kidney issues; it's also thought that KPU is at the root of Mallenders/Sallenders . Back to these metabolites/postbiotics, and collectively, amongst others, they provide system-wide nutritional, metabolic, immunomodulatory, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. In other words, they're fabulously beneficial and seriously important. Provided we feed our horse with what they’re meant to eat, those friendly hindgut fibre-fermenting microbes will not only look after the host, but create a whole extra range of beneficial metabolites/postbiotics. But - as above, exposure to toxins/environmental chemicals will damage the gut microbiota composition, and there's now growing evidence that this can also trigger obesity as a result. If you cast your mind back to the year 2000, this is when vets started recognising EMS as a syndrome, with the slow recognition that chemical pollutants (herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics) linked to obesity in mammals slowly appearing over the next 5-years and onwards. Come 2006 and certain environmental pollutants were now named as ‘’obesogens’’, compounds that disrupted and interfered with the body’s homeostatic control of fat storage and energy pathways, the endocrine system being the first target. Cut to today and it's no secret that we're seeing a significant rise in endocrine dysregulation in horses, affecting both young and older horses alike. With the last decade being very microbiome-focused in human health, current focus from the worlds environmental, toxicological and pharmaceutical scientists is now on how biodiversity of the gut bacteria protects against environmental pollutants. And there's good news on the equine front - we're now slowly seeing early research being published on the equine gut microbiome. Analysis of wild horse biomes are finding that they contain certain gut bacteria that eat up chemical pollutants and convert them to harmless substances. Apparently these bacteria are present in a small percentage of domesticated horses as well, but sadly not in the majority. So, perhaps we need to urgently re-wild our horses' microbiomes to offer protection against chronic endocrine dysregulation, and no surprise, it all starts with getting feed right. Forage diversity is key! I know I bang on about this all over the website but as the gut biome's ecosystem loses its diversity, this opens the door for emerging pathogen bacteria to translocate into the host. So, we need to increase the complexity of our horses' diets with as many varieties of herbs, wild plants, shrubs, berries, barks and trees as possible, and if it's tricky to do it naturally, see our WildFed/WildVits supplements. Hedgerow foraging - Hedgerows are often the last bastion for many wild plant species, providing a wide range of equine-appropriate vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients. If you can, fence off a small area and start to grow your own biodiverse ecosystem . I know, easier said than done for some, but planting a wild rose (rosa canina), hawthorn (crataegus) and willow (salix alba) in field corners, with maybe a few herbs like comfrey, chamomile, calendulas, chickweed, cleavers, meadowsweet, is a great start. Give your horse a mineral-balancer break for a week or two, a couple of times a year. It's now thought that horses may be struggling with a modern gut-version of eutrophication, as in the overgrowth of some bacteria species due to the over-provision of mineral nutrients. Pathogen bacteria have their place within the biome but as always, it's all about balance - the bad guys need to be controlled by the benenficial police-force bacteria that protect the host, which is why toxic exposure is so detrimental. NB - Apologies; while I was researching this information I've managed to mislay the source pages somewhere deep in my document folders. If/when I find them I'll update this section accordingly.

Proper hydration is not only essential for life - it’s critical for overall longevity and good health. Every single one of the trillions of cells in the body needs water to function. Yet, millions of us humans are chronically dehydrated despite conscious attempts to drink more water. So why is proper hydration so tricky? The Problem With Plain Ol’ Water Being hydrated and drinking water are not the same thing. We could drink water all day long and still not be hydrated, because proper hydration requires water to be absorbed by the body’s cells, which isn’t possible without the help of electrolytes. Whether human or horse, the body needs the appropriate balance of sodium, potassium, magnesium, and other electrolytes to help bring water into the body’s cells. The human body is at least 60% water, and of that, about 1/3 is located outside the cells - extracellular water - with around 2/3 is inside the cells - intracellular water. Electrolytes are responsible for maintaining the appropriate balance between intracellular and extracellular water. They play a significant role in kidney function which regulates water balance, and while it can get a bit science-y, the take-home message is that drinking water alone (especially after bouts of heavy sweating, diarrhea, and vomiting in humans) without including electrolytes can cause dehydration to get much worse on a cellular level. A lack of water and/or electrolyte imbalance (like too much water, not enough electrolytes, or vice versa) can cause the body’s cells to shrivel up or swell, depending on the imbalance, which directly affects their function. Even a low dehydration level is enough to impact cognitive function, resulting in loss of focus, confusion, headaches, dizziness, lightheadedness and fatigue. Does dehydration drive disease? We need water to convert food into energy, lubricate the joints, cushion bones, regulate body temperature, produce tears and saliva, as well as the mucus that lines the sinuses and GI tract. Plus - blood is 90% water. Dehydration means metabolic complications, high blood pressure, inflammation, joint pain, dry mouth, dry eye, constipation, and sinus infections. The relationship between dehydration, chronic disease, and disease-related mortality is well-established. Last year, a study published in Nutrients looked at the hydration status of adults aged 51-70yo, and it found that 65% failed to meet hydration criteria. Remarkably, zero deaths related to chronic disease were reported in people who met the proper hydration criteria and had no chronic disease at the start of the study. Dehydration was more common in individuals with insulin resistance, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and high blood pressure. It was also associated with an increased risk of mortality. In most cases, the root cause of dehydration in our western world isn’t due to a lack of water availability, which means it must be related to something else. Besides not hydrating properly (with water and electrolytes), the Standard Crap Diet is likely to blame here. It’s loaded with refined sugar, starch, inflammatory fats and salt from artificial, ultra-processed foods. On average, caffeinated and sugar-sweetened beverages contain in excess of 40g of sugar, and let's not forget that alcohol and mixed drinks are also very dehydrating. Combine these together in a meal (which we often do) and it’s a recipe for dehydration disaster. Hydrate The right way General guidelines for drinking water vary and rarely ever mention anything about electrolytes. When they are mentioned, it’s usually in reference to sports drinks that contain high amounts of sugar, artificial flavours and fake colours - our ancestors didn’t have sports drinks, and they did just fine. We can get electrolytes from fruits and vegetables - bananas, avocados, sweet potatoes and squash are rich in potassium. Spinach and kale are full of calcium and magnesium. Add a pinch of sea salt to a home-cooked meal or a handful of nuts. Where we live, our size, physical activity level, age, how much we sweat, and how much we travel, are all going to impact how much water we should be drinking, but it’s essential to recognise signs of dehydration to be sure we’re drinking enough. Dry, cracked lips? Tired? Thirsty? You may want to up your intake. For humans, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine recommends women drink 2.7-litres water/day, men 3.7-litres/day – this includes water in food as well. You can add electrolytes to water using a high-quality electrolyte supplement, or squeeze ½ a lemon or lime into water with a pinch of sea salt. This ensures water is being absorbed and properly hydrating the body’s cells. Proper hydration requires adequate water intake with the appropriate balance of electrolytes. Without it, we put the body’s cells at risk of dehydration and all the downstream effects that occur as a result of that. Whether human or horse. 😉

While inflammation is a natural part of life that is usually beneficial, when inflammatory pathways are constantly activated we start to see more chronic problems develop - cue onset anxiety/stress, brain fog, memory loss ... Inappropriate feed, exposure to toxins, stress levels, even genetics, can impact the body - and the brain's - propensity towards inflammation. Dr Mark Hyman Anyone who's had a sore throat, rash, or a sprained ankle, knows about inflammation. Inflammation is a normal, appropriate response of our defence system to infection or trauma - we need inflammation to survive.⁣⁣  The trouble occurs when that defence system runs out of control, like a rebel army hellbent on destroying its own country. Whether horse or human, most of us are familiar with overactive immune responses and too much inflammation in common conditions like allergies or arthritis, or autoimmune syndromes such as pollen reactions. But - it's now thought that deep-rooted, hidden inflammation is at the root of all chronic human illnesses - heart disease, obesity, diabetes, dementia, depression, cancer, even autism.⁣⁣ We may feel healthy, but if inflammation is raging inside of us, then we have a problem.⁣⁣ What causes inflammation, what does it do, and how can we control it? When you hear the word 'inflammation', what comes to mind? For many of us, it probably conjures thoughts of the body’s common response to infections or blunt-force injuries , like swelling after a kick or a fall. This type of acute inflammation is a critical function to healing the body - it's an innate part of the body’s immune response; without it, infections, wounds, and other types of tissue damage would be unable to heal. Acute inflammation is necessary and beneficial for an effective recovery process. It’s the way the body gets immune activity and nourishment to an area that needs it, and we're all familiar with it on the surface of our body - it’s local heat, redness, swelling, and pain, but it’s very important that inflammation stays where it’s supposed to stay and ends when it’s supposed to end. If it doesn’t, it becomes productive of dis-ease - cue a pro-inflammatory state. Regular, sustained inflammation is invisible to the naked eye and occurs when the body’s natural defences remain in a constant state of alert. Over time, this sustained inflammation can start to damage healthy tissues, organs, and cells , and eventually lead to a variety of unwanted health conditions - as per our ' Everything's Wrong! ' page (in 'Herbal Nutrition by Condition' off the main menu). Inflammation is a biochemical cascade that runs upstream from the cells, through the tissues, organs and systems. This can take anything up to 48-hrs from the initial trigger, leading to a swelling in the soft tissue - this is the pain stage. Same as for us if we’re travelling on a plane and our feet swell - it hurts like mad because the swelling can’t go anywhere, and worse, we know if we take the shoe off we’ll never get it back on again. Hence why if a horse has acute laminitis, the inflammatory pressure is agonising because the inflammation is completely trapped inside that solid hoof capsule and can't go anywhere. There's more ... inflammation and weight gain are also connected : Poor habits such as sedentary behaviours, unhealthy diets, and consuming high amounts of ultra-processed foods and sugars will eventually increase the number of fat cells that are stored in the body. High levels of fat cells eventually trigger the body to turn on their natural defences, and over time, lead to sustained inflammation. As the body continues to store fat and cause persistent weight gain, the fat cells expand beyond their capacity, which becomes another source of ongoing inflammation. So, inflammation breeds body fat, and body fat breeds more inflammation – a vicious cycle impacting overall health, well-being and the ability to be active. The good news is that the default state of the body is one of continual cellular regeneration - without this process, the body simply would not exist. However, when the body is sick, this re-generative process is overcome by a de-generative one. This is where nutrition comes in - species-appropriate food literally is medicine, able to fuel the body back into healthy balance by supporting the immune system to full strength again (all covered in our ' Fix the cell to get well ' page in our ' Herbal Nutrition by Condition/The Immune System section). Controlling inflammation through diet One of the most powerful tools for combating sustained inflammation is diet - feeding the wrong foods not only leads to weight gain but also accelerates the inflammation process. However, if we feed what the body is meant - evolved - to eat , we can effectively switch off inflammation through diet, reducing the level of inflammation in the body, and significantly lower the risk of inflammation-induced health issues down the line, by cutting out those feedbags of ultra-processed, refined carbohydrates and excess sugars. A study carried out by the Gastrointestinal Diseases Research Unit at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, has recognised the distinct connection between inflammation and weight gain. The theory is that refined carbohydrate density, or the percentage that a certain food is made of refined carbohydrates, is one of the most important variables when it comes to a food’s potential to cause inflammation and weight gain. The more refined carbohydrates jammed into a given gram of food, the more likely it is to cause inflammation, and subsequently, weight gain. Unfortunately, our modern-day food processing practices only add to the level of refined carbohydrates found in our foods today, whether human or horse feed, creating what is now referred to as acellular foods, aka pure, structureless sugar or starch. Therefore, to reduce inflammation in the body, we need to veer away from those ultra-processed convenience-oriented feedbags that promise all kinds of spin yet deliver very little other than a damaged gut system, and instead focus on feeding what the horse’s gut has evolved to eat, namely hay, hay and more hay, for fibre, fibre and more fibre; remember, a horse is nothing more, and nothing less, than a fibre-fermenting machine. So, the golden rules: Feed hay to optimise the hindgut microbiome. Heaps of the right nutrition to keep the cells well via plant power . Regular toning of the body's own natural detoxification system - the awesome combo that is the liver and kidneys . The positive knock-on effects, in addition to helping reduce inflammation, is that feeding a horse how it’s meant to be fed will also make them emotionally and physically stronger too. 😉 More on the whole huge subject of immunity in our Herbal Nutrition by Condition/Immune System chapter, and for all-things-feed, it's our ' Feeding our Horses ' section off the main menu.

(Yes I know the image relates to our human diet, but I think you'll get the picture 😉) It’s always good to hear positive news on improving the health of our horses, and especially with us all having become microbiome-aware over the last few years, as well as many horse carers investing in the EquiBiome test. There’s also a new word on the block – commensal gut microbes. I say ‘new’; the term's actually been around for a while, but for the past however-long we’re probably more familiar with the word ‘friendly’, as in the ‘friendly’ gut bacteria/microbes that do all the good stuff for the body. In latin, ‘commensal’ means ‘to eat at the same table’, so to use their proper name in context, the commensal bacteria are the ‘friendlies’ who, in essence, eat/feed ‘at the same table’ as us, as in they eat the same food we eat. In return, provided we’ve fed them with the right stuff (as in not junk, which feed the bad, unfriendlies), they look after us right back, as in you, me, or our horses, by generating protective responses to prevent the bad guys - those pro-inflammatory, gut-damaging microbes - taking over the microbiome colonies, and kickstarting the hindgut acidosis/dysbiosis/SIBO/leaky gut domino-effect as they go. It’s basically about the entire ecosystem of the gut system, and just like us, our horses literally are what they eat. By feeding the right food to our horse, and therefore the friendly commensal bacteria, those microbes will be more successful and reproduce at a higher rate, crowding the bad guys out of the picture. The hindgut bacteria responsible for fermenting the fibre portion of our horse’s grass forage are typically associated with a higher, more neutral pH in the gut which is exactly how it should be – the intestinal region should always be at a neutral pH value. However, feed junk , i.e. sugars, starches, bad carbs, refined, artificial, uber-processed, and not enough of the species-appropriate cellulose fibre, and we’re simply feeding the pro-inflammatory bacteria, who will then over-flourish and produce negative by-products for the horse, i.e. lactic-acid (the haylage connection), which lowers the pH value to acidic … cue that aforementioned hindgut acidosis domino-effect. So, keeping the commensals happy is crucial. Feed a species-appropriate, diverse plant-based diet of appropriate fibre-rich grass forage and plant foods, and you look after the entire gut ecosystem. And the only place to get this appropriate fibre? Long, stemmy grass/hay - not our neon-green grass which is nothing but leaf blades with no stems or fibre; we need those grass blades to grow into a long stem over a summer as this is where that vital fibre resides. But … it’s an even bigger picture than this. Prebiotics Feeding a range of diverse, stemmy fibre-rich grass forage (hay) also ensures a varied intake of specialised prebiotic fibres. They not only act like a fertiliser that stimulates the growth of the commensal friendlies, but they also maximise the abundance of beneficial metabolites - those hindgut fermentation by-products necessary for the body’s metabolism, aka postbiotics. Before you get brain-freeze, don’t panic – we already know these guys. Metabolites/postbiotics are those bioactive compounds we know as short-chain fatty acids – proprionate, butyrate and acetate, which are the very source of our horse’s energy , plus certain amino acids and vitamins, particularly two vital B-vits in a specific activated form, not to be confused with the regular form we get in typical B-vit supplements, which the horse's gut system neither recognises or knows what to do with, so hoofs them straight out for excretion. As the saying goes, 'An expensive way to make urine'. We're specifically talking about vit.B12 as methylcobalamin and B6 as pyridoxal-5-phosphate , aka P5P , and not synthetic pyridoxine (check your B-vit supplement). P5P (not pyridoxine ), is critical for the liver’s natural detoxification role, and very much part of the KPU-affected horse's recovery therapy. If your B-vit supplement contains pyridoxine, again, another expensive way to make urine. These metabolites, collectively amongst others, provide our horse with system-wide nutritional, metabolic, immunomodulatory, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. What’s not to love about that … 😉. It gets even better. Prebiotics also help prevent the colonisation of Salmonella and E coli bacteria. How? 🤓Science Alert!🤓 They do so by binding to the carbohydrate receptor sites on the actual bacteria which are usually used to bind to the intestinal wall epithelial cells, tricking them that they’re already bound to the epithelial cells, so preventing them from proliferating. It’s now even thought that prebiotics may be a useful alternative to antibiotics. Science Alert over. So, long and short, provided we feed our horse with what they’re meant to eat, those commensal bacteria will not only look after the host, but create a whole extra range of beneficial metabolites/postbiotics. Happy days 😊. Here’s why keeping up with the latest science is so important. Another vital consideration regarding the metabolism of prebiotics, their resulting postbiotics, and subsequent health benefits, depends entirely on the variation – the diversity - of the total gut microbial composition. Specifically, health benefits will only be fully achieved if specific bacteria/groups of bacteria are present within the entire eco-system of the gut landscape. It's an even bigger picture than this though – it’s also about the diversity of the forage our horses eat, as in a range of various species of grass forage, because … it’s all about the different fibre qualities, as in cellulose/hemicellulose, that goes through the hindgut. Remember, the whole microbiome - the very eco-system of all the trillions of bacteria bugs in the gut system - outnumber the body’s cells by at least 10-1; they also outnumber DNA cells by a whopping 100-1 (we really are all more bug than organism), so the current thinking is now saying that supplementing just one type of microbe could well disrupt this fragile ecology. In other words, making sure the right bugs are in the microbiome is key. As I type, the primary focus now on equine prebiotics is focusing on actual foods – what foods are prebiotic that are going to help the beneficial bacteria to grow? You may have seen Jerusalem artichoke or chicory, foods that feed the good bacteria to grow within the gut, and not necessarily inulin (which is pectin-oriented), nor fructo (sugar), nor mannan (yeasts). There’s an old vet technique used in the days before antibiotics, where a ‘poo tea’ was fed by nasal gastric tube to reestablish a damaged microbiome. It’s still occasionally done, but these days the difficulty is finding a donor horse with a healthy hindgut who has never had haylage, or antibiotics, plus it needs to be ‘fresh’ poo as the faecal microbes oxidise very quickly. Research is apparently ongoing on this though. In that strange, perfect, parallel world that none of us live in, life would be so much easier if we could simply be able to feed healthy, equine microbiome-appropriate, cellulose-digesting microbes to our horse when there’s a biome disturbance, to regenerate the microbiome and outgrow the bad guys. This way we’d easily be able to support and restore the natural microbiome that the equine gut system has evolved since millenia, because the modern-day equine gut hasn't changed one iota from their wild-horse ancestors from all those millions of years ago. But sadly, such a supplement doesn’t exist. Yet. Long and short? It's more about living more probiotically, feeding the commensal hindgut cellulose-digesting microbes with what they like to feed on, namely stemmy, cellulose-rich hay. Feed decent hay 24/7, and the thinking now is that maybe there might be no need to feed a probiotic.

Despite this rather miserable summer we’ve had with some serious fresh grass growth, personally I'm always happy at this time of year to see the rested pastures now bearing long, seeded, standing-hay grasses, full of fabulous fibre in those long stems. This long, standing-hay grass has now pushed all its nutrients into the seed, ready to reproduce, which means the plant itself has now lost a fair amount of its nutritional value. Great news for our metabolic horses, hence why I'm always happy to see it, but it's not so great for our poor-doers, i.e. our TB, Carmen – just as she gets some decent weight on her from the summer forage, the last thing I want to happen now is for her to drop it as we head into autumn. So, for those of us with poor-doers, now may be the time to think about increasing the protein content for them while they can still hold their weight. This year I'm going to switch Carmen's feedbowl forage carrier to Agrobs’ Myo Protein Flakes, a fibre-based forage component feed for horses needing higher protein requirements. To quote them, “a combo of protein-rich meadow grasses and herbs, providing easy-to-digest proteins to help loss of muscle tone due to illness or age.” Here’s the full spec from Agrobs’ webpage - https://www.agrobs.de/en/myo-protein-flakes-p3379/ , and you can buy them direct from EquiSupermarket - https://www.equisupermarket.co.uk/p/agrobs-myo-protein-flakes-20kg Alternatively, the protein pattern from legumes, i.e. alfalfa or sainfoin, includes a higher proportion of the essential amino acids lysine, methionine and threonine. But – with the feed cautions relating to alfalfa , sainfoin is a better alternative. I didn't know this but apparently sainfoin was once a traditional forage for horses, only replaced by alfalfa 50 years or so ago since the introduction of intensive farming practices . It has the advantage over alfalfa in that its tannins are much kinder to the equine gut - apparently they help stabilise the intestinal environment so making nutrient absorption more effective. Plus, because of its high protein content, it’s beneficial for our typical poor-doers as we head towards the end of the grass grazing season, i.e. TBs and the senior horse, plus where there's loss of muscle tone or dental issues. It’s also a useful forage for growing youngstock, competition horses, and pregnant/lactating mares. The higher protein content in sainfoin balances out the deficiencies in standing-hay and the tannins also make it easier to switch from grass back to hay for autumn/winter, so our poor-doer horses can continue to obtain optimal nutrients throughout. It’s also very palatable - I tried my lot on it earlier this year when we went away for a long weekend, to make life easier for the daughter who was house-sitting for us, and they loved it! Which makes it ideally suited to mix into feedbowls as a therapeutic feedbowl forage carrier. Simple Systems sell sainfoin in pellet form ; TopTip – this is a very popular product and sells out quickly; they also sell it in 1kg ‘ Brix ’ blocks. So here's to the slow handover from a rubbish summer into autumn; now to try and devise a way to stop the others mugging Carms for her higher protein feedbowl 🙄  Originally posted September 2021

"Brewers Yeast has recently been at the mercy of new research and published studies, with the data showing the yeast involved isn’t equine gut-microbe appropriate, as in it’s the wrong type of microbe, as in it's an imposter." Dr Christina Fritz - This blog was originally published 6.6.21

The latest data on 'chelated' minerals v. natural sulphate minerals (Originally published 5.6.21)

Today I’m so unbelieveably sad - not for me but for a horse.

If you (or your horse or dog - my words, not the quote) had a form of joint disease, would you treat it as if you had allergies? Or EMS/diabetes? Institute of Functional Medicine You wouldn’t think so, would you. Yet these days we should perhaps be thinking that the answer to this is more of a Yes, because science is showing – and we’re becoming more aware - that there’s a growing epidemic that the gut is the hidden cause of most chronic disease . As we all know by now, everything starts with the gut, but these day I now say all over the website “ … but everything begins with the microbiome.” One of the biggest roadblocks to perfect, smooth, functioning health is impaired digestive health. This is because without normal digestion, the body’s ability to absorb healing nutrients and remove toxins that disrupt homeostasis suffers greatly. What’s more, this very complex system is connected to every other system in the body. When digestion suffers, nothing works well. What’s interesting is that leaky gut , also known as intestinal permeability , is not a new problem - in humans it’s long been associated with gastrointestinal diseases like Crohn’s and Celiac. There's also no doubt that leaky gut is a growing problem, and one that extends far beyond the gut - in humans it’s being linked with numerous serious health concerns including autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases, including lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and Alzheimer’s. * Edited to add (15.7.21) - Latest science is now showing that Glyphosate, the most prevalent - and highly toxic - agrochemical weed-killer used worldwide, is now thought to be directly responsible for increasing this widespread phenomenon of leaky gut, damaging the immune system and creating a systemic response of inflammation. See our Blog Post - Glyphosate - the latest data on its harmful effects Researchers today are looking at how, in human health, leaky gut is a major cause of many chronic diseases and how it might be more common - and more harmful - than imagined. It's no surprise because basically, leaky gut means that the yukky undigested, toxic contents of the intestines have 'leaked' through the fragile intestinal wall membrane (the mucosa) into the bloodstream, and sent the immune system into a state of Red Alert panic. This epidemic affects us all, whether horse or human, even our dogs. So, let's get the low-down on leaky gut. Leaky gut explained Leaky gut is basically about digestion gone wonky, and while some pre-digestion begins in the stomach/foregut, most digestion and absorption of nutrients occurs in the intestines, where the microbiome lives - multi-trillions of friendly microbes and not so friendly pro-inflammatory gut-damaging microbes, all (hopefully) living in reasonable harmony together and running the show. When everything's functioning as it should, the cells that line the intestines, the mucosa, are linked securely together with tight junction proteins that create a barrier, and control what gets passed through into the bloodstream to fuel the body. Vital nutrients are let through, and foreign substances such as toxins are mostly kept out. Those that do slip through are swiftly tagged by the immune system with antibodies to signal white blood cells to get rid of them. However, if this fragile mucosal lining is disrupted, the integrity of that protective barrier weakens and gaps/holes can develop. Cue intestinal permeability, and once that fragile intestinal lining has been compromised, undigested foreign proteins, and other food components not yet broken down by normal digestion, 'leak' through into the bloodstream in high concentrations. This is what’s commonly referred to as 'leaky gut' . Sounds very unpleasant I know, and it's because it is - it needs to be taken very seriously. These foreign substances overwhelm the immune system and create an inflammatory response that leads to sgnificant health problems, not only in the digestive tract but throughout the entire body. Ultimately, a leaky gut has the potential to set the stage for a long list of systemic problems - it starts with symptoms that are easy enough to ignore, a bit of mild indigestion, maybe a bit of gas and bloating, but it then slowly progresses to intestinal misery - diarrhoea or worse, blockage, and loss of appetite. Now we're heading towards a full-body crisis - loss of condition, fatigue/lethargy/brain fog, mood swings/anxiety, joint pain/arthritis, allergies, skin problems, hormone imbalances ... And one absolute guaranteed problem - a significantly weakened immune system leading to various autoimmune syndromes. A whole ton of symptoms - because this is how interconnected gut health is with the rest of the body. If the gut's leaky, other chemical processes, organs, and tissues in the body won’t function well either. How leaky gut happens Okay, let's get to the nitty gritty. When we (whether human or horse) eat a meal, each chewed mouthful (bolus) passes from the mouth, down the oesophagus, into the stomach/foregut to be mushed about like the inside of a washing machine into a slime called chyme (ooh, get that rhyme 😎) and onwards into the small intestine, where the chyme works its way through the many miles of GI tract. Finally, after digestion of the proteins, starches and fats, what’s left (the fibre) passes through to the large intestine/hindgut where the cecum and colons finish the job off, with the friendly fibre-digesting microbes fermenting the fibre, producing the energy source for our horse, and eliminating the waste out in neat little parcels. 😉 The small intestine is where the main digestive action - bar fibre - happens (via digestive enzymes), where nutrients are assimilated by the friendly gut microbes and then absorbed into the bloodstream to go fuel the body. It's a bit clever - the miles of intestinal walls are covered in tiny finger-like projections called villi, with each of these villi covered in even tinier fingers called microvilli - picture them as coral fronds waving gently in the ocean shallows. These villi and microvilli are where the nutrient-absorption action happens, along their own surface membranes. Clever little fronds. That said, these nutrient absorbing, microscopic microvilli fronds are lined with just one - yes, that's just One - equally microscopic single row of cells (epithelial, if you're interested), collectively known as the mucosa. This literally means that the only protection between the body and the yukky contents of the small intestine is just One-Microscopic-Cell thick. So vulnerable! Yet an utterly crucial part of the gut system, being that it's the absolute master nutrient-absorption area. That said, one microscopic cell isn’t exactly much protection against yukky, dangerously toxic, undigested poisonous matter. So what protects this exposed yet critical component of the gut system? Simples - a beautiful, beneficially reciprocal relationship between the gut microbiome and the immune cells, that’s what. As in, the friendly bacterial microbes, because inside the GI tract are multi-trillions of bacteria made up of hundreds of thousands of different species, including a motley crew of viruses, yeasts, amoeba and other parasites, all working together. Collectively, they’re the microbiome. Most of this microbial population are commensal bacteria, which in Latin roughly means “to eat at the same table”. Which is a good way to look at them as it simply means that the commensal bacteria eat the same foods as the host does, especially fibre, regardless of whether we’re human, horse or even dog. (Quick digress – I got my own microbiome tested in 2019 and the results came back saying my friendly gut bugs were (quote) ‘veggie munchers’; quirky, cos I’m a vegetarian, not necessarily by choice (although I'm happy to be) but because we discovered back in my teens that my gut, literally, struggles to digest meat, aka, wrong-kind of microbes. 😉) This is one reason why fibre is such an important part of the diet, even for dogs. Fibre from fruits, berries and veggies feeds the commensal bacteria communities, and in return, they produce digestive enzymes to break down the food nutrients into amino acids, fatty acids et al. Commensal bacteria are considered not only beneficial for their digesting abilities, but provided there’s enough of them, they also help protect against the pro-inflammatory, pathogenic bacteria - the bad guys - by competing for food and the best places to live in the gut. Provided the gut biome/flora environment is in balance, there’s a beautiful co-operative going on as they all function in harmony together - as long as the bacteria stay in the gut. Luckily, the commensal bacteria don’t actively cross the one-cell intestinal membrane barrier. And this is important, because if they did, this would trigger the immune system into battle. And that would cause systemic inflammation. The leaky-gut/immunity connection The body’s immune cells work carefully with the commensal bacteria to make sure they don’t break through the barrier and force the immune cells to respond and trigger inflammation in the body. This is why there’s a high % of immune cells in and around the gut system, around 70-80%-ish, and it’s these immune cells that physically protect the delicate border between the gut contents in the small intestine, and the bloodstream and organs on the other side. However - we know gut inflammation can happen because leaky gut exists. While the intestinal wall cells normally work together like a tight zipper, if there's more of the bad microbes than the friendly microbes, especially lactic-acid bacteria, they release lactic acid gas which blows up the small intestined like a balloon - gas has no place in the thin tube that is the small intestine - and the pressure tears open the zipper-like junctions between the cells. Cue a permeable gut lining, aka leaky gut. Result? Warfare. One Almighty-Immune-Response that triggers chronic inflammation in the entire body. This leaky gut-related inflammation is the driver of most chronic diseases known in humans - dementia, autoimmune disease, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, liver/kidney disease, cancer, IBS, allergies … all can be caused by leaky gut, with thousands of studies over the last decade looking at the role leaky gut plays in well-recognised established health issues. The blame-game Top of the list, and you've guessed it - an unnatural diet . Never mind the way us humans eat; the way we feed our domesticated horses here in the UK barely comes close to resembling the diet that evolution designed the equine gut to eat over millions of millenia. Grazing on our totally wrong type of neon-green leaf-blade grass, full of grass sugars, pectins and zero fibre, alongside the sheer volume of highly processed feedbags for a feedbowl that's been cultivated for convenience instead of species-appropriate, does not a healthy gut make. Great news for the pro-inflammatory bad gut microbes though, as, as their favourite food is undigested carbs and sugars. Non-stop stress - some stress comes with the territory, bringing on a temporary fight/flight response - a biological throwback to run from the sabre-toothed tiger. But ongong, chronic stress tells the body that there's a tiger hot on the heels all day long. The fight/flight stress hormones drag the body's badly needed energy and resources solely into the brain and muscles, which results in digestion being switched off, slowing the movement of food through the gut and leaving it sitting, rotting, in the GI tract - no surprise that this compounds the problems associated with leaky gut. Gut-disrupting toxins - toxins can enter the body via three routes; ingested,i.e. artificial chemical treatments on feed as well as mycotoxins from mould spores; through breath - i.e. air pollution, crop spraying, pollens; finally there's pharma drugs which disrupt the microbiome, and antibiotics which kill it off. All these disrupt the cell membranes, acting like free radicals and causing serious inflammation. This in turn compromises the immune system, disrupts homeostasis, and allows bad bacteria to flourish and upset the balance of the microbiome. Arguably the most common symptom of leaky gut looks a lot like allergies, because an allergic response is considered an autoimmune response, and leaky gut is thought to be the cause of autoimmunity. But now let's bring proteins into the mix - if the gut is permeable, undigested proteins will leak out before they’re digested, and this is a problem because … The immune system recognises foreign invaders by their proteins , so when it sniffs a protein in the body where it wouldn’t normally be, i.e. a viral or bacterial protein, the immune system would attack it as a matter of course. It would then file away the information about the protein in memory cells, which make sure that the immune system will quickly recognise and destroy that same invader if it comes back. Which means, leaked food proteins can trigger the same immune response that bacteria and viruses would, thanks to those undigested food proteins leaking though the gut wall. Cue food intolerance, aka hypersensitivity. If the microbiome is in good shape and the small intestinal gut membrane is zipped up, proteins from food won’t pass through the gut lining until they’re digested, where they’re broken down into small units called amino acids. The body won’t suffer the same immune consequences because the proteins have first been dismantled into their respective parts. But if they leak through ... Food intolerance is one of the biggest signs of leaky gut, but there’s more. Because leaky gut triggers an immune response in the entire body, it can be hard to detect, but common signs include: Autoimmune disease Arthritis and joint pain Allergenic responses Skin issues Digestive issues – any abnormal change means gut disruption Liver, kidney, pancreas Aggression/anxiety Thyroid issues (and in turn, thyroid issues can worsen leaky gut) The signs are varied because the chronic inflammation leaky gut causes can affect any (or multiple) organs - it’s truly a whole-body issue. It also shows that leaky gut is much more common than scientists first believed, and potentially more disastrous for all of us. Since a large percentage of us, our horses and dogs, have one or more of these health issues, let’s look at the causes of leaky gut. If one or more of these apply, there’s a good chance it’s down to leaky gut. Thing is, though, there are two problems with diagnosing leaky gut. First, there isn’t really a standard diagnostic test for detecting leaky gut syndrome. Vets can carry out stool culture evaluations, or take bloods to evaluate the functional capacity of the liver; I believe there's also a hypersensitivity check for unusual proteins in the blood, but it may come back with a sensitivity to most proteins. This could mean leaky gut because it means the immune system is reacting to pretty much everything that leaks through, but if there’s only sensitivity to one or more proteins, it doesn’t necessarily mean it's leaky gut. I've had clients tell me their vet has said their horse has an 'infection' in the gut, and usually prescribes antibiotics, which only make the problem worse. Secondly, leaky gut can cause many other diseases. A GP or vet will treat the resulting symptoms with chemical pharma meds, but more than likely this will only makes the leaky gut worse because the body has to metabolise those chemicals, on an already overburdened body. Perhaps the best way to determine if there’s leaky gut is to look at the stressors the gut system’s been exposed to, i.e.: Antibiotics – which wipe out the entire microbiome. Drugs - i.e. NSAIDs, vaccines, steroids, antihistamines, vet meds etc. Stressors – chronic long-term stress basically shuts the gut function to Off, while releasing its own toxicity residue. Yeast overgrowth. Age – as we all age, the number and diversity of gut bacteria start to decline. Glyphosate - bit of a nasty one, this, glyphosate being a herbicide that’s also antibiotic. Unless you’re feeding organic, if there’s local crop spraying to you, or if your field is fertilised or sprayed with anything, i.e. to kill off docks or thistles, there’ll be glyphosate. If there are grains or legumes (alfalfa) in the diet, again unless they’re organic, again there’ll be glyphosate - the ingredients with the highest glyphosate content include oats, wheat, soy, potatoes and legumes (chickpeas, peas, lentils, beans and peanuts). Glyphosate is also found in most grains - unless they're organically grown. As earlier (as at 15.7.21), see our most recent Blog Post on the latest glyphosate revelations . Lectins - lectins are natural proteins in plants that act as a defence mechanism against predators. Which is fair enough – plants have every right to defend themselves, but when we eat the plant, those lectin proteins attack the mucosal lining of gut. Beans, peas, soybeans, lentils and other legumes have the highest lectin content of any food group, as do members of the nightshade family, i.e. peppers, potatoes and tomatoes. Lectins are also found in most grains with the exception of sorghum and millet. For us humans at home and especially if you’re a veggie, if you’re soaking legumes, i.e. chick peas or kidney beans, add a slosh of ACV in the soaking water as this helps to break down the lectins. Gluten – as well as us humans, many dogs are gluten-sensitive. When we eat foods with gluten, the small intestine produces zonulin, a chemical that signals the tight junctions of the intestinal walls to open up, creating permeability. Mycotoxins - mycotoxins are cancer-causing moulds that grow on grains, legumes and other starchy plants. They’re found in many processed pet foods; Purina has been quoted as referring to them as an “unavoidable contaminant.” Hmmn. Perfectly avoidable if you feed raw. Not unsurprisingly, mycotoxins have been shown to increase intestinal permeability in most species. Dairy - whey and casein are proteins in milk that can also cause gut inflammation, so be aware if you're feeding a whey protein to your horse. Both casein and gluten share a similar molecular structure and 50% of people who are gluten-intolerant are also casein-intolerant. Sheep/goats have a different type of casein, which could make them easier to tolerate, but they're still high in lactose. Most dogs don’t produce the enzyme lactase, which is needed to digest the lactose in dairy products, so if your dog is eating kibble or has a dairy sensitivity, then there could be leaky gut. Supporting a Leaky Gut The first step is to try and eliminate, as best you can, any or all of the contributing factors you have control over that cause gut inflammation – gut-disrupting foods, chronic stress, and toxins – and monitor to see if there's any improvement. It's a bit do-or die really - if we don’t eliminate the causes of leaky gut, the leaky gut will never resolve, and neither will the health issues it creates. Stop all drugs and antibiotics (it might be time to upgrade to a holistic or homeopathic vet). Horses - seriously check what’s going in the feedbowl. See our 'Feeding our Horses' section, and specifically the page ' Why what we feed has to be right '. Remove stressors, as the stress hormones themselves not only disrupt then shut gut function off, but release their own buffet of toxicity side effects. Now to supplements and foods that can help repair the gut lining and reduce gut inflammation: The Leaky-Gut Fix-Kit - Weed, Feed & Seed It’s imperative to regenerate the friendly gut biome colonies to crowd out the pro-inflammatory, gut-damaging pathogen bacteria, in order to rebalance the gut microbiome and the immune system. Weed It - weed out the bad stuff. Remove all processed, C.R.A.P.* feeds from shiny feedbags piled high in our feed merchants, which are filled with molassed-laced, poor-quality, pointless fillers (oatfeed/wheatfeed, cereals, grains, corn, soya etc etc etc), mostly chemically treated with numerous toxic sprays, including glyphosate, as well as being GM. In other words, all typical feedstuffs that have shifted our equine world over the last half-century towards an exploding disease state. And all cheaper than a bag of shavings, so how can that be healthy? See our Why what we feed has to be right/The Feedbowl page.⁣ Feed It - feed biologically species-appropriate, real food, high in diverse, multi-species soluble fibre, preferably organic to avoid the toxic chemical saturation from all the growth treatments the non-organic agri-crops have been sprayed with. See the What I feed page. ⁣ Seed It - plant the seeds for more of the friendly hindgut fibre-fermenting microbes, with wonderful prebiotic fertiliser, aka equine-gut-appropriate fibre from long, stemmy, coarse forage roughage, i.e. hay, hay, more hay and only hay. The stems are where the magical cellulose fibre is - this feeds the friendly microbes who give back important nutrients - postbiotics - and the energy source for our horse. The more fibre we give to the friendly hindgut fibre-fermenting microbes to do their thing on, the more we're sowing friendly microbe seeds in our microbiome, because the happier they are, the more they'll multiply, and keep the bad guys out. So, here's the Fix-Kit: Feedbowl - Personally I love the Agrobs' brand - their Weisencobs/WeisenFlakes or any of their chaffs. We need fibre diversity in the gut - remember the paddock of thirty-years or so ago with 30-40 different plants and grasses? Agrobs blend over 50 different grasses and natural herbage, all grown using organic practices. For the dysbiosis - a 1-month course of our SIBO-CARE blend. Repairing the gut membrane - See our GutAminos , a combo of two vital amino-acids for the cellular membrane protein repair, specifically L-Glutamine with N Acetyl L Cysteine (NAC) which is is the precursor to the body's master antioxidant, Glutathione. L-Glutamine is an important part of resolving leaky gut because it’s the preferred food of the cells lining the gut wall, so it helps with their growth and repair. L-Glutamine also supports the mucosal lining in the gut and can help maintain the right pH balance. It’s so important to gut health that low concentrations are linked to gut permeability and inflammation . For us humans L-Glutamine is found naturally in spirulina, broccoli and asparagus, but when leaky gut is present, it should be also be supplemented separately. Leaky gut/SIBO hurts - you would have likely seen gut flinching, biting, head swinging back to the hindgut, maybe even cow-kicking. In extreme cases, alleviate with our TriBute alongside our SIBO-CARE for 7-days; then continue with our DuoBute . Extra support Aloe Juice - used medicinally for over 5,000 years, Aloe Vera juice comes from the inner fillet of the leaf, not the harmful latex or outer leaf. Aloe Vera contains aloe polysaccharides which actively promote tissue and cell regeneration and are anti-inflammatory. Aloe can also form a thin mucosal coating in the lining of the GI tract that can remain for up to 48-hrs, which can provide fast relief. Find it in your local health-food shop.  Linseed (micronized), a staple in my feedroom as you all know 😉. Apart from all its other health benefits It’s also a gut system superstar. Thanks to its high soluble-fibre level (around 27%) this makes it high in mucilage, so wonderfully lubricating for the inflamed gut membrane. Another of the many benefits of micronization is that it beneficially changes the structure of the seed’s grain which greatly increases digestibility in the small intestine by up to 90%, helping to reduce the burden on the large intestine and reducing the risk of overloading the GI tract and hence reduce the risk of colic, laminitis and acidosis. Herbal Therapy There are some really beneficial herbs to feed as food for an easy and effective way to support gut health. Essentially, you’re feeding the equine gut the beneficial plant chemicals the way evolution designed it millions of years ago, the design of which to this day hasn’t changed. For instance, bitter receptors throughout the GI tract are still programmed to respond to bitter flavours (found in herbs) to activate the release of saliva and enzymes to pre-digest food. Look to Andrographis, Dandelion Leaves and Sarsaparilla. Certain herbs carry potent antimicrobial and detoxifying compounds that help fend off pathogens and eliminate toxins. Mucilage herbs provide a demulcent - a substance that relieves irritation of the mucus membranes by forming a protective film that acts like the mucus barrier in the gut until you've rebuilt the mucosa. Berberine helps promote a healthy microbiome with natural chemicals that help suppress the overgrowth of microbes in the small intestine. Spirulina has potent detoxifying powers, thanks to its rich stores of the chlorophyll pigment, which binds to toxins in the GI tract and holds them there, preventing them from being absorbed. These include herbicides, pesticides and mycotoxins, as well as heavy metals and plastics such as BPA and phthalates, which are being studied as possible endocrine disruptors and carcinogens. * C.R.A.P. - not me being rude; it stands for C arbs R efined A rtificial P rocessed.

Another case of ‘everything’s connected'

Much as many owners of IR/EMS horses depend on soaking hay being a crucial lifeline for their horse, there's now evidence out there showing a significantly increased bacterial risk to the gut system when soaking. I used to steam our Kelso’s hay day-in, day-out, because of his chronic respiration - it wasn’t about the grass sugars for him, it was all about the airborne respirable dust for him, full of allergenic bacteria, moulds, fungi and yeast. However, there's now evidence out there showing that steaming hay to reduce the grass sugars may also be infinitely healthier for our metabolic horses as well. There are some pretty nifty benefits to steaming that we already know - unlike soaking, steaming conserves the minerals, trace elements and crude protein , whereas soaking hay has been reported to cause significant losses of minerals and soluble protein. Steaming also uses far less water and is much less laborious - lugging heavy soaked haynets is a right royal pain – breaks your back and you get soaked jeans in the process. With Kelso's steamed hay I simply pitchforked it straight from my (home-made) steamer into his stable. Best of all though, high temperature steaming has a major advantage over soaking: it kills bacteria, mould, fungi and yeast , producing hygienically clean forage for our horse. Now for the grim stuff Soaking has always been the traditional method for the metabolic horse to reduce the nutritional value - some would say it's life-saving, but – there are studies out there ( Moore-Colyer et al 2015 , Wyss and Pradervand, 2016) that show soaking increases the bacterial content of hay , “compromising the hygienic quality and raising the bacterial concentration above the upper safe limit of 20µg/g”, which could lead to colic/autoimmune responses. Worse still, the post-soak liquor is a strong pollutant - biological oxygen demand (BOD) of nine times that of raw sewage (Warr and Petch 1992). Hence why you can’t pour it down storm drains. We've all seen what that water looks like after a long soak, never mind the raised bacterial concentration. No surprise that some horses really struggle to eat soaked hay. Now to the WSC stats - that same study measured WSC (Water-soluble carbohydrates -- measures simple sugars and fructan levels. Simple sugars are digested in the foregut and raise insulin levels) in several different steamed UK hays – average losses were variable between 2.3% - 18% , compared to soaking variables starting less at 2% , with the higher values impossible to determine due to the variables in soaking time. A 16-hr soak recorded losses of 54%, which for owners of EMS horses is appealing, but ... with leaky gut now considered an epidemic, is the increased pro-inflammatory pathogen bacterial risk worth it? Either way, these numbers show that unless you're going for the long soak, which will mean the increased bacterial risk, neither soaking nor steaming are going to reduce the WSC hay content significantly. For sure, if you're concerned about the leaky-gut risk for the EMS horse, steaming is certainly a consideration for the Bigger Picture. That said, for the seriously hardcore carb-intolerant metabolic … that same study suggests a soaking-then-steaming combo, or at the very least a darned-good hose down to wash out as much of the soak-water as possible. How to make a home-made steamer There are probably tons of ways on YouTube, but this is what I personally did. Take 1 wheelie bin (yes I shamelessly robbed our home one), a grid/grill thingy from a BBQ to wedge inside the bin a good 8"-plus off the bottom, and a £20 wallpaper steamer from B&Q or similar. These wallpaper steamers are brilliant - they're like an oblong plastic 'kettle' where you add in the water, with a long bendy hose that emits the steam. Obvious I know but you'll need an electricity supply at the yard - I only say this as some yards don't have electricity. (Got the husband to) Drill a hole at the bottom of the bin, big enough to fit the hose through and under where the grid will be. Fill bin with hay - or haynets if you prefer - and close lid, fill steamer with water, switch on and let the cycle finish - you should get around 40mins to an hour. When done, wheel your bin to where you want the hay - in my case Kelso's stable, where I tipped the bin on its side, flipped the lid open and forked the hay straight out into a big pile for him. So easy. References: https://www.researchgate.net/.../268875565_The_Effect_of... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25426729/ Stockdale, C and Moore-Colyer, M.J.S (2010) Steaming hay for horses: The effect of three different treatments on the respirable particle numbers in hay treated in the Haygain steamer. European Workshop for Equine Nutrition, Cirencester, Sept 2010. The Impact of nutrition on the health and welfare of horses. EAAP publication No. 128. Ed Ellis, A., Longland, A.C., Coenen, M and Miraglia, N. p136-1382. Moore-Colyer, M.J.S and Fillery, B.G. (2012) The Effect of three different treatments on the respirable particle content, total viable count and mould concentrations in hay for horses. 6th European Workshop for Equine Nutrition, Lisbon, Portugal, June. 101- 106.3. Moore-Colyer, M.J.S. Taylor, J. and James, R (2015). The effect of steaming and soaking on the respirable particle, bacteria, mould and nutrient content in hay for horses. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science. Aug 20154. Moore-Colyer, M.J.S. Taylor, J. and James, R (2015). The effect of steaming and soaking on the respirable particle, bacteria, mould and nutrient content in hay for horses. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science. Aug 20155. Wyss, U. and Pradervand, N. (2016) Steaming or Soaking. A groscope Science. Nr 32 p32-336. Moore-Colyer, M.J.S. and Payne, V. (2012) Palatability and ingestion behaviour of 6 polo ponies offered a choice of dry, soaked and steamed hay for 1 hour on three separate occasions. Advances in Animal Biosciences. Healthy Food from Healthy Animals. Vol 3 part 1. 1277. Brown, E., Tracey, S and Gowers, I. (2013) An investigation to determine the palatability of steamed hay, dry hay and haylage. Proceedings of British Society of Animal Science Conference, Nottingham April 2013. p 1048. James, R. and Moore-Colyer, M.J.S. (2013) Hay for horses: The nutrient content of hay before and after steam treatment in a commercial hay steamer. Proceedings of British Society of Animal Science Conference, Nottingham April 2013.9. Moore-Colyer, M.J.S. Taylor, J. and James, R (2015). The effect of steaming and soaking on the respirable particle, bacteria, mould and nutrient content in hay for horses. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science. Aug 201510. Warr EM, Petch JL (1992) Effects of soaking hay on its nutritional quality. Eq.Vet.Edu. 5:169–171. Brown, James S et al. “Thoracic and Respirable Particle Definitions for Human Health Risk Assessment.” Particle and Fibre Toxicology 10 (2013): 12. PMC. Web. 29 Nov. 2017. National Research Council. Nutrient requirements for Horses. 6th rev. ed. Washington DC. USA: National Academic Press; 2007. Moore-Colyer MJS, Lumbis K, Longland AC, Harris PA. (2014).The effect of five different wetting treatments on the water soluble carbohydrate content and microbial concentration in hay for horses. Plos One. Moore-Colyer, M.J.S. Taylor, J. and James, R (2015). The effect of steaming and soaking on the respirable particle, bacteria, mould and nutrient content in hay for horses. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science. Aug 2015 Warr, E., and Petch, J (1992) Effects of soaking hay on its nutritional quality. Equine Veterinary Education 5: 169-171 Wyss, U. and Pradervand, N. (2016) Steaming or Soaking. Agroscope Science. Nr 32 p32-33