Whenever you read about oxalate affected horses you read a lot about calcium. The traditional approach has been to bombard the horse with well in excess of the recommended levels of calcium in order to overwhelm the apparently difficult to absorb calcium oxalate.
EquiFeast’s approach is not to add calcium supplements – in fact we generally take them away. And we feed a supplement that DOES NOT PROVIDE CALCIUM TO THE ANIMAL. Confusingly this stuff is called chelated calcium and some people will tell you that chelated calcium is better absorbed than limestone. I have no idea if that is true. I have never trusted the experiments that try to measure such things as they are far too easy to rig which is why some nutritionists agree and disagree about the bioavailability of chelates.
But it doesn’t actually matter because the various forms of chelated calcium molecules that exist are very stable. That means that they hold on to their calcium very tightly. More tightly indeed than calcium oxalate (which is also a chelated form of calcium but a bad one). So chelated calcium doesn’t work by providing calcium but it does seem to work by getting calcium signalling working as nature intended.
Chelated calcium molecules are a normal and natural component of the blood of animals. They are clearly measured and regulated by the body which supports the notion that they have important work to do. There are channels and pumps inside cells that manage chelated calcium and move them around and those channels (called VDACs) are located at specific points where calcium is removed from the cell – a crucial job in relaxing muscle cells and turning other cells off).
So supplementing ENOUGH chelated calcium restarts calcium signalling processes all over the horse’s body promoting health, wellbeing and excellent performance.
The chelated calcium used in BREAK FREE is protected by an Australian patent. So no other product (whatever it may claim) is even slightly similar to BREAK FREE. Indeed no other product has anywhere near as much chelated calcium as BREAK FREE.
See what Louise Comiskey has to say about two very extreme cases:
Buy BREAK FREE from this site in Australia