Vitamin E for Horses

And so I guess the sort of basics of the conversation is what role does vitamin E play in the horse's body or health? And why is that? Why is it an important conversation?

Yeah, so that's a great place to start.

Vitamin E is a fat-soluble vitamin, and its main really important role in the body is to act as an antioxidant.

So for example, in muscles, like as the horse is exercising or just in its daily life, it's going to produce these things called free radicals, which can damage different parts of the cell.

And so vitamin E is there to protect cell membranes from those molecules that can be damaging.

So it neutralizes those.

And so that's important for muscle, but also nerve cells, cells of the immune system, reproductive health, kind of all cells of the body.

It's going to be important for protecting the fatty structures in the cells.

And so horses will normally get their vitamin E from pasture.

But then if you have horses that are on more hay, that's when you're going to see maybe that their intake is not quite high enough.

And so you might start to see horses becoming deficient in vitamin E.

Yeah.