By Sarah Welk Baynum
Most horse owners know how important gut health is for their horses. Because of this, prebiotics and probiotics are a popular choice for helping keep a horse’s gut and gastrointestinal tract healthy and happy.
However, there is a fairly new “biotic” researchers are talking about that you might not have heard of: postbiotics.
Here is everything you need to know about what postbiotics are, how they affect a horse’s gut health, and when they might be needed in supplement form.
What Exactly are Postbiotics?
As most horse owners know, the horse’s digestive system has a direct impact on their overall health.
As a refresher, prebiotics are non-living ingredients that help maintain the good microorganisms in a horse’s digestive tract. While they are not meant to be digested by the horse, they do help nourish and grow these good microorganisms. Prebiotics act as a source of nutrition for the bacteria in the hindgut, but horses do still need probiotics to eventually produce postbiotics.
Probiotics, on the other hand, are living organisms that help repopulate the horse’s gut with good microorganisms AND assist in keeping the horse’s hindgut healthy. Probiotics help protect against harmful pathogens, encourage beneficial bacteria to grow in the horse's small intestine, improve digestion, and help with nutrient absorption and immune health.
Postbiotics, similar to prebiotics, are non-living microorganisms that have a number of health benefits to a horse’s gastrointestinal tract. However, postbiotics can also be derived from living organisms, such as probiotics, but always contain a mixture of unpurified inanimate organisms that include their metabolites.
To put it more simply, postbiotics are what’s left behind after a horse is finished digesting prebiotics and probiotics. In fact, they are produced by a combination of prebiotics and probiotics in the hindgut.
An example of what some of these postbiotics nutrients might look like are amino acids, B-vitamin, and Vitamin K. Antimicrobial peptides can also be one of these nutrients, which help prevent the overgrowth of harmful bacteria in a horse’s gut
After a horse eats, the food travels through a series of stops in the digestive tract. Because horses are hindgut fermenters, the majority of the digestive processes, and the absorption of nutrients, happen in their hindgut.
A horse’s microbiome produces over 1300 metabolite chemicals during the fermentation stage of the digestive process, which is performed by the microbiome. These chemicals formed during the fermentation process are postbiotics.
The production of postbiotics depends on the quality and variety of the horse’s diet, as well as the unique microbial strain makeup in their gut. The quality of the food the horse is eating has a direct connection to the quality of what’s left over after the digestion process is complete.
An unhealthy gut biome leads to issues with the production of postbiotics, which can lead to other issues, like disease and deficiency.
How Postbiotics Help
If a horse’s microbiome is unstable, this gives infections an opportunity to invade and affect a horse’s health.
Horses can become stressed for any number of reasons—whether that be hauling, attending events, social changes, etc. This can result in a change in population of the microbiome that are in a horse’s intestine. If the microbiome can be stabilized during these times of stress, this helps maintain a horse’s overall health.
While we still don’t fully know exact mechanics of a horse’s microbiome, or how exactly postbiotics fully work just yet, we do know they are very beneficial for things like microbiome optimization and helping improve the horse's immune function.
There are also several types of postbiotics. One of which is Short Chain Fatty Acids (SCFA’s), which are a chemical that influence things like immune function. SCFA’s are one of the more highly produced metabolites in the microbiome. While there are hundreds of individual types of SCFA’s, sodium butyrate is one of the most abundant ones found and is a byproduct of the fermentation process in a healthy gut biome.
Sodium butyrate has a number of functions, including controlling inflammation, regenerating colon cells, stimulating digestive enzyme production, regulating gut mobility, and helping absorb nutrients by contributing to the integrity of the intestinal wall.
Horses with gut related issues typically show low levels of B12 and folate in their blood tests. This is because these essential vitamins are produced in the gut and colon, along with vitamin k2. Vitamin B12 counter-acts the effects of stress and folate helps produce hemoglobin, among other duties.
This is yet another reason that good gut health is vital for a horse’s overall health, and imperative for performance horses especially.
Should You Consider a Postbiotic Supplement?
Postbiotic supplements can have a number of benefits, but they are still a very new type of supplement.
When considering if your horse might be a candidate for a postbiotic supplement, one thing to consider is horses who may need additional immune system support or have weight challenges. Horses who have frequent stressors from things like competition, hauling, and heavy training might also be good candidates for a postbiotic supplement. This is because there is a significant drop in the quality of the horse’s microbiome when horses become stressed.
Postbiotic supplements typically have ingredients derived from probiotic yeast, such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast, which can help a horse’s gut microbiota become more stabilized even after the stress triggers that would normally upset the microbiome of the intestine lining.
Because postbiotics don’t rely on having a live organism in the product, they might be a great alternative, or addition, to prebiotics and probiotics because they are highly stable.
However, postbiotics are still very new to the horse world, and since we are still waiting to see more research on how postbiotics affect a horse’s GI tract, it might be best to wait until we know more to start supplementing with postbiotics.
