“If the doctors of today don’t become the nutritionists of tomorrow…the nutritionists of today will be the doctors of tomorrow”. This is a sentiment that is growing in popularity in the field of human nutrition. Interestingly though, your horse’s diet and his nutritional status are often times not considered terribly significant to his treatment plan. Furthermore, little attention is given to how nutrition may have played a role in your horse becoming sick or compromised in the first place.
Dr. Simonson clearly believes that nutrition is NOT an alternative therapy but rather a core and key component to your horse recovering from disease, healing from injury and staying healthy. After graduating from vet school, Dr. Simonson realized the lack of information about nutrition that actually gets taught in school and decided to get further educated. Her focus centered around the deriving of nutrients from whole food sources rather than from synthetic sources. Then came the realization of how truly therapeutic food can be and how important balancing minerals can be to the health and the prevention of many diseases and conditions in the horse.
While there is no one way to feed a horse, it is important to remember that horses are forage animals and their diet should always center around the quantity and quality of that forage. There is nothing more alarming than the increasing numbers of horses that are developing symptoms of Metabolic Syndrome, glucose intolerance or insulin resistance…all forms of a diabetic like condition in people and other animal species. Diet plays a key role in managing these horses and possibly keeping these problems at bay. It is therefore important to have the discussion of just what your horse’s nutritional needs are in order to keep him healthy and try and avoid potential problems. As the saying goes, “you are what you eat” and in the case of your horse, “he is what you feed him”.