Has industrial sourced Selenium added to modern feed balancers been acting as Pro-oxidants all along and have been insidiously harming horses?
No one is quite sure; all we do know is that there is an ultra thin line between benefiting horses with Selenium and poisoning them. Now in the industry there is a theory that even providing recommended daily dietary levels of Selenium to horses over a period of time from an industrial source (a mined elemental source as opposed to an organic source) by way of a pelleted feed balancer could be less advantageous than thought and acting in the opposite way to the Anti-Oxidant way Horse Owners have been lead to believe.
The theory behind this augment is that when plants such as Algae and yeasts take up Selenium they take in only that which does not kill them and do not create free radicals and although feeding Selenium directly an an element i.e. not having been absorbed by another body, may appear to help the horse early on when fed following a deficiency slowly even when fed a low levels it causes harm.
We do not have to worry one way or the other with EQUINOURISH as the Selenium present has been taken in by the seaweeds which we then process and include in the formula, no mined minerals are added, the vast range of minerals in EQUINOURISH are all presented to the horse via the same plant- to- animal transfer process.
It is interesting that although the Selenium levels in Seaweed can be small compared with some levels included in mined mineral supplements there has never been an incident of insufficiency or toxicity recorded in horses when being fed on Seaweed which cannot be said for all horse feeds. This of course may be due to human error as in the infamous Medipharm case with the Polo Ponies a few years back and other similar calamities, the pro-oxidant theory is not referring to nutrient levels but saying that straight Sodium selenite in feed balancers act counter-productively.
Opinions are split on this it would be too easy to jump to conclusions nothing is as good or as bad as it first appears.