Magnesium often receives little attention in equine nutrition. For example, you will rarely see it listed in the analysis on  a feed bag. Despite this, it could easily be argued that no other mineral has as many important functions.

The biochemistry is complicated but basically the energy locked into your horse’s food is transformed and stored as high energy bonds between phosphate molecules. The highest energy form is ATP, adenosine triphosphate. Magnesium is required to stabilize and store ATP. Without it, all cells would die.

Magnesium is also required for all genetic  material, DNA and RNA, to function and be transcribed. You can’t get much more basic to survival than that.

Science has so far identified over 300 enzymes that require magnesium to function. Virtually any body function you can think of requires adequate magnesium at some step along the line.

While calcium (last week’s blog) is often a major…