Why Horse Supplements Are Only Guessing - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #168

My wife placed a supplement ad for horses in front of me and said it was "interesting." She knows me, so she was testing me to see if this one was really special or just another waste of money. Rather than give the same old response about marketing ploys to take money without substantiating the product, I decided to go deeper. The expression "correlation does not mean causation" is familiar. But what about randomized, controlled studies - the "gold standard" of research? Do these expensive, precise studies live up to the hype? Not necessarily.  Mendelian randomization is a new approach to randomizing a study population in a true and natural way. It reduces (or eliminates) biases by looking for variations in the genetic code that have occurred over millions of years. This podcast goes into SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) and GWAS (Genome Wide Association Studies) to see if this new research technology has come into horse research, and more importantly, if it can prove the use of supplements to make horses healthier.