What is individualized nutrition?

Here at Honos, I mention it all the time, but what does it actually mean?

Individualized nutrition means feeding the horse in-front of you. That means: Understanding their unique base requirements - workload, stage of growth or recovery, lifestage.

Learning their diet & health history to further customize these requirements, because horses aren't textbooks - we can start with textbook values, but that should be the starting place, not the goal. Evaluating environment, because your horse's environment can further influence both requirements and feeding behaviour. Monitor their body's response to their diet adjustments to further identify individual needs. Body condition at different calorie intakes. Topline maintenance with different protein sources. Vitamin levels on different forms and sources. Metabolic stability on varying thresholds of NSC intake.

While horses have similar, predictable requirements based on their anatomy, every single horse has different nutritional requirements. These are dictated by a number of factors, some that we can see, some that we can quantify, and many which are still being researched to understand the nuance - individual variability in gut microbiome populations is one large area of study. This variation alone impacts your horse's ability to use calories from hay,  AND how their metabolism reacts to calorie restriction - some horses have unique microbe function that allows them to maintain body condition despite very low calorie intakes, which is why weight loss - and gain - cases can be so tricky to handle on your own as a horse owner.

Other variations include SNPs - single nucleotide polymorphisms, which basically are genetic alterations which limit how your horse's body uses different nutrients. This is another area of research, but data from other species, including humans, tells us that 1 single alteration can lead to significant effects on absorption - for example, a SNP in humans will dictate whether Tylenol helps you with headaches!

Progress over time is crucial for better understanding your horse's individualized nutritional needs, which is why I love my H-On Track program - we learn so much about your horse, which allows us to make small, meaningful changes with a high confidence of results.

One senior horse may require 85% of their Lysine requirement from bioavailable sources to maintain topline. 

A growing horse may be more sensitive the mineral ratios in her hay. 

A horse with allergies responds more dramatically to adjustments in keratin producing minerals lacking in soil. 

Every single case I work on is so different! And so, while I wish I could tell you the perfect diet for every horse, this looks very different across differing needs, individual metabolisms, genetic predispositions and available feed items.

The best diet for your horse is one that meets their unique needs, and that's where Honos starts, and the H-On Track program takes it further. 

Work with me to develop an individualized nutrition plan for your horse: www.honosnutrition.ca/book-now