Reading Probiotic Labels
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I commonly get asked about giving probiotics to horses, and what I recommend. While probiotics are often simply described as "good bacteria", a better definition is "live microorganisms that, when ingested in certain amounts, cause a positive health effect beyond that of their nutritional value." This definition makes it clear that there must be live microorganisms, they must be given at a certain dose and they must cause a beneficial effect. Unfortunately, while there are many, many probiotics available for use in horses, and lots of money spent on the marketing of such products, there has been basically no real research done on any commercial equine probiotic. That makes it difficult to make good recommendations. Studies have also shown that commercial probiotics often don't even contain what they say they do. So, what do I say when I'm asked? I say it probably won't hurt to give an adult horse a probiotic (one study in young foals showed that a probiotic actually caused diarrhea), but there is no guarantee that it will help either. One thing that I do recommend is always to read the label closely.
The label of a probiotic product should clearly state:
- Which organisms the product contains (and they should spell all the organisms' names correctly (don't laugh, it happens!)).
- How much of each organism is present (this is often measured in CFUs or colony-forming units).
- An expiry date.
- Whether the numbers of organisms are guaranteed to be present at expiry - sometimes the stated number of organisms is what was put into the product, with no understanding (or guarentee) of whether they will still be viable at the time of use.
- No excessive claims of effectiveness. (My general rule is that something that promises to cure everything, it probably cures nothing!)
While a good label is certainly no guarantee that the probiotic will work, it seems logical that companies that can't even get the label correct probably aren't making a good product either. We did a study on this a few years ago, for which we simply bought a variety of commercial probiotics and read the labels. I wasn't sure whether to be amused or disgusted by the results, but I certainly wasn't amazed:
- 35% of veterinary and 43% of human products improperly identified their contents. Many used vague (and useless) descriptions like "probiotic cultures." It wasn't even clear in some of the products if live bacteria were expected to be present.
- In 18% of veterinary products that listed bacterial species, the names of the organisms were misspelled.
- Bacterial species were misidentified in 35% of veterinary products, including claiming to contain bacteria that do not exist.
So, probiotic are very much "buyer beware." Until consumers start demanding proof from companies that their products are effective, we may not get much new information.
More information on probiotic use in horses can be found on the equIDblog Resources page.
