Can Hemp Seed Oil Reduce Inflammation in Horses?

Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast

Inflammation occurs naturally in horses and is often part an animal’s healing response, but chronic, low-grade inflammation is a contributing factor in diseases that affect the health of horses, according to this week’s podcast guest, Kristine Ely.

Last month, Ely defended her doctoral thesis at Virginia Tech, where she conducted a study to determine the effect hemp seed oil would have on inflammation in sedentary horses.

She said inflammation is associated with but not a cause of a variety of diseases in horses, from osteoarthritis to metabolic syndrome and laminitis.

“There's a lot of ill effects with inflammation, (so) it's an important aspect to mitigate and moderate the kind of inflammatory responses we have in the animals,” she said.

There are pharmaceutical treatments for chronic inflammation, but Ely said use can result in negative digestive and kidney issues.

Increasing poly-saturated fatty acids in diet is one known way to address inflammation — think fish oil supplements and Mediterranean diets.

One such fatty acid is gamma-linolenic acid, or GLA, which has been shown to to increase the anti-inflammatory response in mammals.

Ely said GLA is uncommon in the typical dietary components of horse feed, but it is found copiously in hemp seed oil.

She wanted to know if adding hemp seed oil to horses’ diets could reduce chronic inflammation.

She completed a feeding trial from May to September 2022, using six thoroughbred geldings.

“I completed what we call crossover,” she said. “Every horse served as their own control, and every horse got to eat both the control and treatment.”

Half the horses were fed a diet with added hemp seed oil while the other half was fed a diet without hemp. She took weekly blood samples, and also took muscle and synovial fluid samples before and after the trial.

“And then I put all the horses back on the same diet for another month because I wanted to capture a washout period,” she said. “Okay, we can manipulate by adding the fatty acids, but how quickly does it go back to normal or are there any lingering effects?”

Hemp seeds and hemp seed oil have GRAS status from USDA — generally regarded as safe for human consumption — but using hemp as a feed for commercial livestock remains illegal at the federal level.

Around the U.S., there is a patchwork of state laws that allow hemp to be fed to companion animals such as horses, dogs and cats.

The issue holding everything up is cannabinoid contamination, especially tetrahydrocannabinol, commonly known as THC, which produces the high associated with marijuana.

What every hempster worth her salt will tell you though is that the hemp seed does not produce cannabinoids, but the flowers where the seeds develop do, so there can be cannabinoid contamination on the outer shell of the seed in minuscule amounts.

Ely fed her horses a commercially available hemp seed oil which she tested for cannabinoids at parts per million. She was not surprised to find very tiny amounts of cannabinoids.

She was curious how or if this would accumulate in the horses bodies, but she detected no cannabinoids in the plasma or synovial fluid of the horses fed hemp seed oil when tested to a 50-ppb limit of detection.

“If you and if you dig into the literature a bit about research specifically supplementing cannabinoids to horses, it takes a bit more of a dose to be able to observe cannabinoids within the horse,” she said.

She hopes her research will help make the case to remove some of the restrictions around hemp as a commercial livestock feed, giving hemp producers another outlet, livestock producers another input, and consumers another option.

The focus of her work was to determine if hemp seed oil can be a good source of polyunsaturated fatty acids for horses. She determined it is, but said “the implications for it’s effect on inflammation require further evaluation.”

Virginia Tech https://www.vt.edu/

Hemp Feed Coalition https://hempfeedcoalition.org/

Go see the movie Common Ground https://commongroundfilm.org/

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National Hemp Association

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