Actually, no. Total myth. We absolutely shouldn’t fear fats - in fact, they make food taste better (apologies to vegetarians/vegans but who can resist lamb chops?!), and best of all, they offer many nutritional benefits. Believe it or not, fats can even help the body lose weight (more on this further on!).

Fat is one of the body’s most basic building blocks. Whether human or horse, we all need fats to survive. Every cell is made of fat - nerve endings are made of fat; hormones are made of fat; the brain is over 50% fat; the metabolism runs better on fat. Fats help the body absorb fat-soluble vitamins found in plant foods, and in humans certain fats can even reduce the risk of serious diseases like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and dementia. The key is eating the right fats and steering clear of the bad ones.

Consuming natural, wholefood-based fats - including (shock horror!) saturated fats - is critical for good health. Yet we’ve been conditioned to believe that unsaturated fats from vegetable and seed oils are the best, while saturated fats like butter, coconut oil, lard, and ghee are toxic. In reality, it’s the opposite.

Just for the record, us humans today consume alarming amounts of refined vegetable and seed oils, loaded with omega-6 fats which contribute to inflammation and chronic diseases. These oils are industrially produced, heavily processed, and chemically treated - watch a YouTube video about how they’re made, and you’ll understand why we should never put these oils on our skin, let alone inside our bodies. The same applies to our horses.

In short, we need the appropriate fats which are the preferred fuel for the organism's cells, because healthy, nutrient-rich fats literally lubricate the metabolic wheels.

The truth about fats

As horse carers, many of us have been taught that fats and oils create body fat, but it's a bit of a bigger picture than this, with a healthy dollop of myth in there as well. Good fats, as in the species-appropriate fats, are super healthy, but the thing is that all fats aren’t created equal. As with feeds, there are good fats, questionable fats, and downright bad frankenfats, such as the man-made, horribly processed PUFA fats you see on supermarket shelves.

Vets and doctors often cling to outdated information and those myths about fats, which prevent them from understanding and accepting the latest science about achieving optimal health, so let's review some of the most common fat myths:

• Fat makes us fat.
• Fat causes heart disease.
• Fat raises cholesterol.
• One of the most common - fat leads to obesity.
• And finally, the infamous myth - saturated fat is bad.

Simply put, this is wrong, but slowly, the message is now getting out there about the importance of fat in the diet. Fat doesn’t make us fat, but the wrong fats will wreak havoc on metabolism. Eating the right, healthy fat actually speeds up metabolism, releases fat from cells, and curbs hunger, while carbs do the opposite - they slow metabolism and store fat.

Benefits of healthy fat:

• Fats help the body feel full and satiated.
• Fats regulate inflammation and metabolism.
• Fats are essential for healthy cell membranes and immune function.
• Fats are necessary to produce hormones.
• Over 50% of the brain is made of fat.

We also know that fat-soluble nutrients need fat for digestion - fat-soluble turmeric is a classic example of this; show me a feedroom that hasn't got a bottle of oil next to the turmeric supplement. For our horses, fat and grass are the perfect pairing because many key nutrients in grass - Vitamins A, D, E, and K - are fat-soluble. Without fat in the feed bowl, these important vitamins won’t be well absorbed.

The real skinny on fat

Let's go back in time for a moment - where did the idea that "all fat is bad" come from? And why do people believe that saturated fat and cholesterol are harmful to health? How did we get to the point where two thirds of our human society is overweight or obese? One thing I can tell you for sure - it didn't happen by accident, and we need to quickly hop back to the late 1950s, when the post-war western world had been in a panic over the rising tide of heart disease over the previous decade, which as far as anyone could see had pretty much come out of nowhere.

Now cut to 1955, and President Eisenhower had a massive coronary while playing golf. As the story goes, he had just eaten a greasy hamburger, which he did often, and at first, he thought the discomfort was indigestion. However, indigestion it wasn’t, and a few days later he breathed his last.

The news of his death rocked the world, and the stock market plunged by $14 billion in a day. And so began the beginning of decades of flawed fat research.

Cut to today, over half a century and a few more decades later, and we pretty much know the real skinny on fat. And if I had a quid for every time someone tells me they’d rather not feed linseed because (they think) it will make their horse ‘fat’ … well, I might not be able to buy a new 4x4, but it might stretch to a new feedbag.

I get it though. I completely do, because for decades, well-meaning diet gurus have preached that eating fat makes us fat. But it really is time to change the way we think about fat, and especially for our horses, because there's a whole other equine twist when it comes to fat.

From the get-go, from all those millenia ago to our modern day, the equine gut simply hasn’t evolved to digest fat like us humans, aside from the very low levels of essential fatty acids (EFAs) content in (what's meant to be) their natural low-nutrient diet of stemmy savannah plain grasslands. Specifically, horses get their EFAs from omega-3 and omega-6 found in grass forage, and this is all the 'fat' that a horse needs to eat to fuel their fat needs in their bodies.

And yet, it's now considered 'normal' for us carers to slosh in extra liquid oil to our horse's feedbowl, so here’s why we really shouldn't be doing this.

Cue a bit of a Science Alert 🤓 ...

Horses can’t handle liquid oil

For starters, unlike us humans, horses don’t have a gall bladder. A gall bladder’s primary function is to store, then release, enough 'emulsifier' – think washing-up liquid poured over a pile of greasy pans in the sink - aka bile, to degrade fat into tiny particles which can then be absorbed through the small intestine.

Not so for our horses. Instead, bile in horses is trickled directly from the liver to match their natural trickle feeding habits. This slow, steady release of just the right amount of bile, is perfectly matched for breaking down the small amounts of EFAs our horses should be getting from a low-nutrient grass diet.

So, three things here:

• Our modern-day domesticated horse is no longer turned out on their historic low-nutrient savannah plains-style grasslands; since arriving in our western world they only know rich, high-carb, high-nutrient, short green grass blades (leaves).
• And ... somewhere along the line, adding extra liquid oil into the feedbowl also became a thing. Except it really shouldn't have, because as the horse naturally produces just enough bile to manage a low-level EFA content from grass forage, they don't produce enough bile to break down all this extra oil, so it slithers all over the digesta in the small intestine. And we all know what a greasy layer does over anything - it acts as a barrier, blocking anything getting through. Which means ... it blocks the vital digestive enzymes from reaching the starches and proteins they’re supposed to digest.
• Which means ... nutrients won't be assimilated or absorbed into the body to be utilised.

Worse, this excess oil keeps oozing onwards and eventually leaks directly into the hindgut, which is toxic to the hindgut fibre-fermenters. So a massive fault in the fermentation process is now triggered, causing a whole extra host of digestive problems.

Let's break this all down.

What actually happens ...

A quick reminder - fats aren’t water-soluble. If you add oil to another fluid, it floats to the top. If you mix your own vinaigrette you'll know what I mean - add vinegar plus oil into a jar, and watch the oil head for the top of the jar. Shake it, leave it, same thing. It separates and heads upwards.

Now to our horses, and pretty much most of what horses eat is water-soluble, as are their stomach fluids too. And here’s another thing – those digestive enzymes that digest starch and protein? All water-soluble too. As is also the digestive enzyme that degrades the natural EFA omegas in grass forage - lipase. It’s water soluble, not fat soluble. Which I know sounds odd (considering it's a fat digester) but there it is. If lypase was fat-soluble it would dive right into the fat and get on with digesting it, but it isn’t.

So how do those EFAs convert to water-soluble? Bile. The magic slow-release bile trickle from the liver.

Converting fat to water-soluble

Bile is made up of bile salts and molecules that are both water and fat-soluble – these are the 'emulsifers' which act just like a detergent, like soap. And whether horse or human, all the eaten food is shaken about in the gut system via intestinal peristalsis, so the fat molecules that usually cling together are now shaken into smaller particles. The longer they’re shaken up, the bile continues emulsifying them into even smaller particles, eventually turning them into fat micelles – tiny fat bubbles but now with a water-soluble surface that the lipase digestive enzyme can now start doing its job. Digestive poetry literally in motion. 😉

But -  if we add extra liquid oil into the feedbowl, the delicate equine fat digestion process is put under huge strain because the bile trickle isn’t evolved to handle this. But also, and this is a big thing - all digestive enzymes are water-soluble and the liver only produces a tiny trickle of bile to convert fats to those water-soluble micelles.

So, since all this extra slosh of liquid oil can’t be immediately emulsified by a big hit of bile, it oozes over the rest of the digesta - the starches, proteins, forage – in the small intestine. This means that the starch enzyme digester, amylase, can’t reach the starch due to the greasy fat barrier, and the protein enzyme digester, pepsin, can't get at the proteins either to break them down into amino acids. Just like our sink full of greasy pans in the sink - without the 'emulsifying' washing-up liquid, everything in there will get smothered with a sticky greasy barrier.

Back to the equine small intestine, this means that the nutrients can’t be assimilated or absorbed into the bloodstream because the digestive enzymes can't get to what they're meant to digest. This carries the knock-on risk of large undigested starch and protein particles reaching the hindgut, which now puts the horse at a major colic and/or laminitis risk ☹.

There's another reason why we shouldn’t add liquid oil to our horse - it will also leak straight through the small intestine directly into the hindgut. And lest we forget, the hindgut microbes' role is to ferment the cellulose fibre from the forage and produce numerous vital byproducts – including the source of the horse’s energy. Worse, with oily undigested starches and proteins also getting into the hindgut, we’re now at serious risk of faulty fermentation and a significant colic and laminitis episode.

Cue the dysbiosis/SIBO/leaky gut/faecal water domino effect, along with those vital byproducts - activated vitamins B6 an B12, certain amino acids, and most critically, the VFAs which create the horse’s energy - no longer being produced.

In short? Adding extra oil in liquid form to the feedbowl creates a huge metabolic problem.

So, what fats should we add?

Horses that aren’t on fresh grass will have an omega-3 deficiency, especially those on a hay-only diet or track system. The best way to compensate for this deficiency is to feed micronised linseed, which is not only easily digestible and very palatable to horses, but - it also rather fabulously has the same omega-3 profile as fresh grass.

NB. If your horse can’t have linseed, alternatives like chia and hemp seeds are also great options.

Time for an oil change?

The higher the quality of the fat, the better the body will function. Every cell in the body needs high-quality fat to build its walls, so it’s crucial to recognise when your horse may be lacking good fats. Look out for signs like dry, itchy skin, tiny bumps on their coat, or achy joints.

Replenishing your horse's omega-3 EFAs with micronised linseed will help regulate inflammation and keep cells flexible and responsive. Whether it’s for us humans or our horses, the wrong fats - cheap, processed liquid oils high in omega-6 - lead to stiff, rigid cells that slow down the body’s functions and make it more prone to inflammation.

🌿 Micronised linseed is brilliant for joints, brilliant for skin, and a gut superstar to boot. Find it blended in the correct ratios in our VitaComplete mineral balancer, or as a straight in our Nutrients shop page.