NUTRITION REPORT: AMINO ACIDS

Amino acids are a hot topic in today’s equine nutrition. They are the vital biological building blocks that link together in the horse’s body to create proteins, which form everything from muscle tissue to organ tissue as well as enzymes, hormones and antibodies. “Aside from water, protein is the most abundant molecule in the body,” says Middle Tennessee State University associate professor Holly Spooner, PhD. “All tissue is made from protein. But it is perhaps the most misunderstood essential nutrient.”

Horse owners tend to focus on crude protein, which, she explains, is actually just an estimate of the amount of protein in a feed product based on how much nitrogen is present (since nitrogen is much more abundant in protein than in other nutrients). “But that doesn’t exactly tell the whole story,” Dr. Spooner says. Quality matters more than quantity when it comes to protein in your horse’s diet—and quality is determined, in part, by which amino acids are present in his food.

All grasses, grains and hays have a certain amount of protein in them. When it arrives in your horse’s stomach and small intestine, enzymes break it down into its amino-acid components. His body then puts these building blocks together in new configurations to make whatever it needs at the moment—for example, new tissue for muscles or vital organs.

Horses, like all mammals, use only about 22 of the more than 500 amino acids that exist on earth. Their bodies manufacture 12 of those 22, so we need to provide the other 10 “essential” amino acids through food: lysine, methionine, arginine, histidine,