Question

I purchased EquiShure recently and noticed the ingredients include salt and saturated fat. Since I noticed that, I’ve hesitated to feed the product to my horse because many of my resources say these ingredients are harmful. I offer salt licks, and I certainly don’t want to overfeed salt. Will feeding EquiShure affect my horse’s salt consumption?

Answer

I understand your concern. One problem with guaranteed analyses on supplement labels is that they can be unintentionally misleading. EquiShure does not contain salt; it contains sodium bicarbonate with a protective coating.

Without protecting the it, sodium bicarbonate would only get as far as the stomach before it entered the bloodstream. With that in mind, researchers investigated ways to ensure the passage of sodium bicarbonate through the stomach and small intestine before it is released in the large intestine and cecum to act as a buffer. Encapsulation technology achieved this. The protective coating contains saturated fat, but it is a minute amount. Researchers have found no effect on blood lipids from the small amount of fat in EquiShure.

The sodium in the sodium bicarbonate is listed on the label, but it is not in the form of sodium chloride (salt). Feeding the recommended amount of EquiShure would not exceed the horse’s salt requirement.

You may notice that horses will not consume as much of the salt licks if they are fed EquiShure because of the sodium bicarbonate, but that is one advantage of offering free-choice salt, as horses seem to eat only as much as their body needs.