What are enzymes?

When a horse eats, much of its feed is made up of LARGE carbohydrate, fat and protein molecules.  

These large pieces of nutrient can’t be absorbed because the gut is designed to only absorb tiny little molecules. 

Why?

Because if big stuff was able to cross from the gut into your horse’s body all sorts of bacteria, toxins and general muck would pass into the body and cause disease havoc!

So before absorption from the small intestine can occur, nutrients must be ‘digested’, which is just a process where the big stuff is chopped up into little stuff.

And it is enzymes in your horse’s small intestine that do this chopping.

It is easiest to think of digestive enzymes as little pairs of scissors.

Let’s look at starch as an example.

Starch (the white stuff you see in the middle of cereal grains) is made up of lots of glucose molecules, all joined together.

The job of the starch digesting enzymes in your horse’s small intestine is to cut starch into single pieces of glucose. Then it is the glucose that your horse is able to absorb.

Each nutrient has its own specific set of enzymes in your horse’s small intestine. So there are specific enzymes to digest/chop up starch, protein and fats/oils.

The enzymes in the small intestine are made by your horse’s pancreas and released into the upper section of the small intestine where they mix with the food passing through your horse’s gut and quickly get to work cutting up nutrients.

Horses have a natural ability to digest protein and fats/oils. However, they have a much more limited ability to digest starch, owing to the variable and often low levels of starch digesting enzymes produced by their pancreas.

Horses with naturally low levels of starch digesting enzymes should be supplemented with exogenous (derived from outside the body) starch digesting enzymes if they are on a high grain diet. This is something I do frequently in growing and racing thoroughbreds with excellent success.

To learn more about enzymes and your horse’s digestive system, read our article The Gastrointestinal Tract: The key to feeding your horse (need link) or ask Dr Nerida AI your specific questions about enzymes.