# "Feeding high energy feeds does NOT make a horse fizzy!" ...Discussion



## MillionDollar (17 April 2007)

Last year in my 2nd year of my Equine and Business Management degree we had a module called Feeding and Training the Horse. 
One lecture we were given these notes-






















We all went "WHAT?!?!" and said we didn't believe this. Many said about feeding their horses oats would make them explode. We had a HUGE debate with the lecturer which is why they got a top expert in from Dodson and Horrell to explain to us.

A good example she gave us was-
If you ate 10 Mars Bars it does not mean that you can suddenly run 100 miles, if you keep eating the Mars Bars you'll just put weight on, NOT gain more energy!

So in other words you can feed what you like to a horse, it will not make it fizzy.

Now I'm still not 100% convinced either way. I can feed anything barley, oats, etc to my horses (believe me i have tried) and it doesn't make my horses fizzy, but I've known horses put on a lush spring grass and they go completely mad.

Both lectuerers and expert were adament that some feed companies had made this myth up of "fizziness" and it was caused by other reasons (weather, temperament, environment, etc). You only have to look at adverts and they talk about a feed not having barley in it so will stop fizziness.

There have been hundreds of studies which do not indicate feed as a source of fizziness.

So what are your views, opinions?? (please bare in mind these are NOT my statements!)


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## Evil_Cookie (17 April 2007)

Bloomin madness if I fed oats to miss-nutty-mare she'd kill me, I have to mess around with feeds as calm and condition was sending her loopy too... maybe its not directly the food but the nutritional inbalances it causes. I've found lack of magnesium a problem, now I supplement it and she's so much calmer.


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## Moggy (17 April 2007)

Im with them on this. I feed my looney oats and chaff and he's sane (ish) If I feed anything with barley in it he's dangerous. However, I but this down to more of an intolerance to barley than 'fizz'.


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## carthorse (17 April 2007)

Don't think it makes much difference to horses that are naturally quiet but think some things upset fizzy horses[ mine went loopy on red cell a few years back]


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## Chex (17 April 2007)

It doesn't matter what I feed Chex, he's always the same. I had thought that feeding a lot of high energy food might give the same reaction that eating tons of sweeties has, the sort of phase when you just want to run around and go crazy until the suger high wears off 
	
	
		
		
	


	




, so that could be fizziness. I've no idea really


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## horsegirl (17 April 2007)

Anyone who believes this is welcome to come and ride my boy after a good feed of conditioning cubes.  Of course eating a mars bar doesn't mean you can run miles but surely everyone has been in the situation where they have too much energy which makes them restless, fidgity.  Just think about children who have been eating too many sweets/E numbers.


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## K9Wendy (17 April 2007)

Have tried many different feeds to increase  'fizziness' that is what we wanted but there wasn't much difference in anything, but what did make a difference was increasing her work load with her feed and really fittening her up.  I think we have a misconception of how fit our horses really are! 

I also believe you cannot chance a horse's nature, there are horses born to be fizzy others born to be sane, and while you can hone this qualities to suit your requirements you can't totally change them.  That's my theory anyway.


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## MillionDollar (17 April 2007)

Yes, i agree with that. I remember my friend after she'd eaten chocolate- she'd go hyper, lol. But this is a person not a horse.


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## Como (17 April 2007)

Hmmm I can't feed my horse sugar beet as he becomes worse than 'fizzy' more like dangerous and he once escaped and gorged on oats - he was unstoppable for days! What is their explanation then as this post doesn't elaborate?


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## MillionDollar (17 April 2007)

Well said, I too have given my NFs and WB and cob high energy feeds including barley and it has never made them fizzy- I also think it has a lot to do with the temperament (and prehaps rider too sometimes).


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## MillionDollar (17 April 2007)

I'll have to look my notes up,  
	
	
		
		
	


	




 can't remember, but apparently theres loads of studies you can look up.


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## TGM (17 April 2007)

[ QUOTE ]
I have to mess around with feeds as calm and condition was sending her loopy too...

[/ QUOTE ] Although Calm &amp; Condition claims to be oat and barley free, it still contains maize which is higher in starch than either of the other cereals!  And it is supposed to be the starch in cereals which is the trigger for excitability.

I'm in two minds on the subject - I know that different foods can affect people differently - some meals can leave you feeling sluggish whilst a sugary drink can give you a temporary boost, so it could quite conceivably be possible for the same to happen to horses.

On the other hand, grains can be a useful food if used sensibly and I think some people are petrified to use them because they think their horse will explode, yet are happy to use a commercial food which they are unaware contains cereals!


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## fairhill (17 April 2007)

I've tried everything going with my current mare, and nothing makes her fizzy or lively. She's now on safe and sound, and has exactly the same available energy as when she was on competition mix. 

My old horse was intolerant to sugar - he had a high fibre, bland diet, and reacted very badly to anything molassed. 
He was given the wrong breakfast by the YO once, which contained sugar beet, and by the time he came in from the field that evening he was soaked in sweat, had been through a fence at some point during the day, and was a nervous wreck when I got on him and then bolted in the school. I could only put this down to his diet and it was too extreme a reaction to just be fizziness!


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## Agent XXX999 (17 April 2007)

Bruce gets two full scoops of oats a day and is fine - but he is in full hard work 

If he was off I would have to rethink 

but he looks very well on it!


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## MillionDollar (17 April 2007)

Fantastically stated, totally agree with you 100%.

So many people are so scared of using oats, barley, etc but actually they are great, and found in many feeds anyway.


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## ihatework (17 April 2007)

An interesting post and one I don't have answers for.
But from a scientists point of view I can see the logic behind why certain different feeds shouldn't produce 'fizz'.
And yes, if you feed too much (ie. input too much energy) then this should be stored by the body as fat. 
Obviously different feeds have a different composition of carbs/fat/fibre etc. which will in turn affect the rate at which the body converts to expendable energy and fat storage etc. 

In my own experiences with horses it is more often than not their natural temprement or environmental conditions that affect their 'fizziness' however I must admit that my current horse is far better on a mainly fibre diet than he is on cereals (of any form) and is less spooky for it.

I believe there is a fair bit of research out there looking at behaviour in children relating to what they eat, some children get really hyper on sugary foods or additives etc ... it would be interesting to know the science behind that. I suspect that there is a complex biochemical reaction triggered that has an effect on the brain and release of neurotransmitters etc. I personally don't see why this couldn't affect horses too?


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## SilverSkye (17 April 2007)

My horse goes absolutely loopy on pasture mix, turns from a sensible (ish) easy to handle horse into a raving looney.
Yet i can feed her racehorse cubes and although they definately add sparkle she is still managable.
I have always put this down to sugar as pasture mix is really sticky to the touch.


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## flyingfeet (17 April 2007)

Eating 10 chocolate bars may not make you have lasting energy, but will send children nuts

Its the sugar levels that makes them batty for short periods - most fizzy-ness is short lived. 

That said, trying to find something to make mine more active as oats don't work....


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## MillionDollar (17 April 2007)

*nods head* Good Points there!


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## Wishful (17 April 2007)

Makes sense in some ways.

If I eat more calories than I burn off with exercise, my clothes stop fitting (i.e. I get fat!)  But if you drink too much caffeine or coke you get quite hyper (Fizzy equivalent) and then sugar rush goes away and you are quite tired.

Imagine the effect of colourings on an ADHD kid!


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## TGM (17 April 2007)

[ QUOTE ]
So many people are so scared of using oats, barley, etc but actually they are great, and found in many feeds anyway. 

[/ QUOTE ] I found it quite irritating when manufacturers advertise their feeds as "oat-free"  when they contain barley, for example, or "barley-free", but contains oats or maize!  I think they are trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, although the statements are factually correct!  The motto is to read the ingredients carefully, particularly if you have a horse with a genuine reason to avoid cereals (ie laminitis, azoturia).


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## K9Wendy (17 April 2007)

I think if we look at the horses natural diet, for instance wild horses, they eat grass, herbs, scrubs, trees, in other words simple vegetation no mention of cereals.  We introduced cereals/concentrates into an animal that never ate them in the wild so you'd image there would be a percentage of these animals that would show an intolerance to them. I would imagine in some animals that would be fizziness..


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## K9Wendy (17 April 2007)

You're quite right... Some manufacturers claim oat free, that satisfies people who dislike oats, while another feed will say barley free, that satisfies other consumers. At the end of the day the more consumers they keep happy the more feed they sell.


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## Magicmillbrook (17 April 2007)

Mollasses definately affects my mare.  I feed purely fibre to all my horse, hay, halege, alphapha and unmollassed sugar beet.  If I had to change I would much prefer to use straights such as oats or barley than commercial mixes or cubes because of the other rubbish they put into it


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## Taboo1968 (17 April 2007)

I actually thought there was scientific knowledge to prove that oats had no heating value???  

As for Barley, well all mine are fed Micronized Barley, one in particular has 2 scoops a day! and he is very laid back

Odie is on 2 full scoops of oats a day along with 2 scoops of competition mix and up until yesterday, he was stabled 24/7 (he now has 2 hours turnout max) and the oats or comp mix have made no difference......


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## Maesfen (17 April 2007)

[ QUOTE ]
Well said, I too have given my NFs and WB and cob high energy feeds including barley and it has never made them fizzy- I also think it has a lot to do with the temperament (and prehaps rider too sometimes). 

[/ QUOTE ]

I do agree with what you've said Clare; it makes a lot of sense.

I also think it has been a lot of marketing hype from the companies knowing how gullible owners are!  Let's face it, so many owners (not counting you knowledgable lot!) nowadays don't have a clue how to feed, they just bung it in and don't know why/how/whatever, then don't give the horses enough work to use the feed and then start complaining it was the feed that's made the horse go loopy, not the fact that they couldn't manage to look after a barn door in the first place!  The companies are bound to want to cash in (as they are) you can't blame them, they'd be fools not to IMO; they're always on the lookout for the next money spinner,'doen't contain barley' is just the one of the moment!  They are usually over generous with their guidance amounts too I feel, so the people that give 'a little bit extra' are compounding the problem too aren't they?! 
	
	
		
		
	


	





In the old days, a good stud groom would know what he was feeding and the result he expected; he also wouldn't have access to any new fangled things like cubes, it would be straights all the way, oats, barley, linseed, bran, sugar beet, chaff, probably some salt, maybe an egg or even some Guinness if the horse needed a tonic, but that would be about the sum of his ingredients.  I know many of them, including an old Major at a RS, that would just feed a scoop of oats alone in the morning, nothing with them, without any problems, the horses didn't go loopy or anything but they were expected to work long and hard.
A lot of the time, the horses now are not asked to work for the amount of food they are getting so it is bound to cause problems which people attribute to the feed when it's nothing of the sort, it is human error!  
No doubt I'll get shot down in flames for that but I seriously believe a lot of the trouble comes down to people not knowing enough (and in many cases, not wanting to learn either).


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## fairhill (17 April 2007)

Well said MFH_09! 
Marketing hype is also to blame for the multitude of supplements now on the market as well, commanding hefty price tags, and promising to cure all evils... which are often brought about from the wrong diet, and not enough exercise.
But that's probably a whole other discussion.


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## Loupride (17 April 2007)

I think it depends on the horse to be honest, Pride can eat ANY feed and it would not affect him however when he is over fit, regardless of feed he can be a handfull!

However I have known other horses who can sniff out an oat and buzz up immediately


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## Tia (17 April 2007)

I believe that these types of feed have to be converted into something.  Now over here I feed oats, the energy is converted to heat - we live in a very cold climate....however if I was to feed it during the summer then I believe that if this energy was not being used up via exercise, then it would infact make the horses fizzy.


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## ihatework (17 April 2007)

And that is the main point of the post.

Would excess chemical energy input (i.e. food) make a horse fizzy in itself? As I said earlier, I don't have the answer to that but any excess energy should in my mind be stored as fat rather than directly making a horse 'fizzy'.

Really interesting post and it would be good if a feed companies nutrionist was reading this and could give a good unbiased reply!


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## airedale (17 April 2007)

flaked maize - always worked a treat on my old nag for extra fizz - above and beyond oats - but then those days I was much braver than I am now and mine was on 12lbs of oats a day


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## muffinino (17 April 2007)

When I was looking after scurry ponies we had teo (father and son) that would go loopy on barley! Difficult to handle, bouncing around in the shafts, un-turnable &amp; un-controllable in the ring (the driver is v. experienced and has had Hackneys &amp; 4 in-hand teams in the past). They only had feeds at shows and as soon as I cut the barley out they had enough energy without being over the top. Not sure what it is in barley that did it but there was definately a change when we took the barley out of the equation!


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## southgate1975 (17 April 2007)

"If you ate 10 Mars Bars it does not mean that you can suddenly run 100 miles,"

But conversly, if you want to be able to run 100 miles, do you deffo need to eat 10,000 calories or you simply wont have enough energy to do it.


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## Gingernags (17 April 2007)

I have to say I agree to an extent.  My old pony was a nutcase, totally hyper - and she would be like that whether she was no on feed, nuts or mix.

I couldn't keep weight on her so I decided to put her on oats - now I'll have been about 16 years old at this point, had the pony for 2 years and was still pretty novice in practice with horses though I'd read and read and read...

Everyone thought I was stupid putting a scatty horse on oats but I explained she already wastes a certain amount of energy going mad out riding.  If I put her on oats - therefore putting more in to her system, she will still be as scatty, not more scatty,  BUT will be using a smaller proportion of energy when being scatty from the total energy available, as there would then be more energy going in than out - result should be weight gain.  Previously she was burning more energy than went in and was losing weight.  It worked.

Now Asti on the other hand, although she's the foal off that loony pony, is totally the other way, you have to keep weight off her and she's very sane.  When she was eventing with one of the kids we tried to "fizz her up" and she was on haylage, and a feed with oats, instant response coarse mix, and sugar beet - and it did nothing at all!  She is impossible to feed "fizziness" to.

Knowing what I do now about food intolerances in humans etc. I think the pony may have had a sugar intolerance, and as it was sugar beet then, not unmollassed speedi beet, and molassed Mollichop not the unmollased diet brands you can get, I think its the intolerance that causes side effects much as it does in humans, so horses that are sugar or cereal intolerant aren't fizzed up by the feed energy contents, its the reaction to the "ingredient" they are intolerant to.


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## Alibear (17 April 2007)

Ok

If you feed a child a packet of skitttles they will run round like a loony for a while

Feed them 2 packets and their off the planet for the day

there for what you eat does affect your own human fizzines.

Fizziness does not equate to fitness which is what you need to run marathons etc.


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## muffinino (17 April 2007)

Agree with MFH_09 too. I was always taught to mix individual feeds rather than go for a mix as you know exactly how much of each goes into the feed. I feed Alfa-A, Bailey's Topline (just a handful), carrots, apples, sugar beet in the winter, eggs, garlic and, due to another post today, am going to try black sunflower seeds! I would not like to give a mix as you can't vary the amount of each thing to suit your needs.


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## juliebrewer (17 April 2007)

I only go by what I have experiants and I find if i feed high protein stuff to a pony it is sharper, yet if I feed a low protein feed stuff it is deffinetly quieter.  I also find stabling a pony makes it sharper.  enough low protein feed will fatten your pony up too because thats how I fatten mine up with lots of roughage...
If I get tired I eat a mars bar and have a cola and it pecks me up abit because of the sugar.
Barley is worse than oats to heat a pony up...

I also find a fat pony is a quieter content pony, where as a thin (not too thin that its weak) is sharper..  
These are only my findings, and I'm a nobody..


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## spaniel (17 April 2007)

I think it would be useful to qualify what you actually mean by 'fizzy'.  Do you mean that the horse has to much 'energy' (in the loosest term) and therefore needs to expend it by arsing about or do you mean that the horses digestive system has been made uncomfortable as a result of overloading it with energy giving feeds which it finds hard to digest.


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## ani_unicorn (17 April 2007)

This makes really interesting reading!  I can feed my mare anything, well anything that she will eat, the only time she gets'fizzy' is when she is fit and not having enough work.  With her its got more to do with boredom than feed.  If I need a bit of fizz I just give her glucose, Im pretty sure its metabolised quickly the same as it is in people because it does have a 'fizzy' effect.  But you then have to compensate and make sure that if she has fizzed alot her salt/minerals are balanced again.  So its probably not a good idea to do on a regular basis.


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## Parkranger (17 April 2007)

all i know is that when I fed my old horse with a bucket of oats (yes seriously) we couldn't understand why we had to scrape him off the ceiling.


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## emma69 (17 April 2007)

When I was feeding multiple horses for riding school / livery yard, we fed straights so we could control how much and what feed exactly each horse got. Barley was fantastic for weight gain, no other feed had such a pronounced effect on weight gain. Horses in moderate to hard work got oats, IMO it definitly gave them energy and I came across very few that had adverse reactions to them. 

That said, I think feeding is part art, part science - you can calculate calories in v calories out (and actual digestible energy) for weight gain, but there is no doubt in my mind some feeds exhibit themselves in different ways. Sugar beet sent a few 'fruit loopy' - far more so than oats ever did - I put this down to being the sugar element, in the same way fizzy pop, candy floss and sweets can send a child hyper, and why adults consume things like lucozade to give them energy rushes. It left their system pretty quickly, anything beyond that was behavioural (e.g. sugar beet  = excess energy which causes horse to buck etc, learns that bucking stops work, becomes behavioral) I certainly feel 'picked up' if I have something sugary mid afternoon. 

On another note, I was amazed that some people used to give their horse oats the morning of a fun ride / hunting etc to 'give them energy' when the horse had never been fed oats before - the horse won't be able to digest them properly, so quite how they thought that would help I am not sure.


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## henryhorn (17 April 2007)

I disagree.
many years ago when training at a yard Spillers used it as their test yard for new feeds.  (nut mixes) It had a lot of different horses there from riding school to eventers.
Every three weeks they arrived, removed all the left over feed and replaced it and we had to monitor horses' behaviour.
I can't tell you how many times we cursed them after they added barley or oats to their nut mix.  We got bucked off, bolted with, the school ponies (some shetlands ) went mental, and eventually they started to use more grass in their pony nut mix.
As part of a controlled trial it was proved that certain foods made the horses hyper, and eventually the event horses owners refused to continue taking part.Where this theoryhas come from I don't know, I can see the sense in soaked oats for instance, oats have never been as bad as barley or maize in my eyes, but feeding high energy without getting fizz just won't wash.
perhaps we could do some trials with the "Experts" doing the riding after they prescribe the feeds?


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## PapaFrita (17 April 2007)

PF is very hot and oats do not make her fizzy. In fact, she's much calmer on straight oats than she was on mixes in the UK so I postulate that it was the molasses/sugar in the mix making her hyper, and NOT the oats/other grain.


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## Bossanova (17 April 2007)

I dont buy the 'oats make my horse mental' thing. I can see that feeding a load of sugar may give them a bit of a sugar rush but cereals? I'm not so sure!

Moon isnt an especially calm type but she copes great on conditioning cubes, alfalfa, sugar beet and micronized barley in large quantities, no way has it made her 'fizzy'


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## prudunce (17 April 2007)

god,maybe baileys top-line is making my mare NUTZ??meant to be cooling but she defo got too much fizz at mo. wat mag supp do u add pls???


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