Fiber is healthy for us because we can’t digest it, so it bulks up our food without adding calories, and provides nutrients to our gut bacteria
Cows have an organ called a rumen that breaks down cellulose into carbohydrates, so they get way more calories from grass than we would. Surprisingly enough, though, horses also can’t digest fiber. Which is why I’ve always found it odd that they eat grass
Both cows, horses and even to a limited extent humans can digest fiber. Cows digest fiber in the rumen where it actually turns mostly into organic acids which the cow can oxidize while the anaerobic rumen bacteria cannot. Interestingly the same thing happens in the large intestine in other mammals. For humans the large intestine is quite small and food moves through there too quickly for much fiber to be properly digested. However the easiest digestible fiber, soluble fiber, actually mostly breaks down even in a human’s large intestine and yields us approximately 2 calories per gram of soluble fiber. For insoluble fiber this amount is extremely low since there is not enough fermentation taking place for it to be completely broken down. However for mammals with a much larger large intestine where food passes much slower, even the harder to digest fibers can be utilized to a large degree.
Horses belong to this category and are called hindgut fermenters. Other examples may surprise you like gorillas and orangutans who have incredibly huge large intestines. That’s why those apes can eat leaves all day and is an explanation why their stomachs are huge without them being filled with fat, it’s all intestines.
However a weakness with hindgut fermentation is that the large intestine can only extract solubles from the microbial mass which leaves out a lot of nutrients. A cow can extract those same organic acids from the fermentation but since the rumen is first in their digestive system the whole microbial mass enters their “ordinary” digestive system which means that they can digest the actual bacteria as well, meaning they manage to extract a bunch of extra microbial proteins that hindgut fermenters may miss. The benefit to hindgut fermentation is however that the first shot at digesting the food is given to the animal itself. A horse can digest starch just as well as a human could but a cow suffers considerable losses in starch digestion since the bacteria gets first gibs, turning the starch to organic acids instead of getting broken down into simple sugars directly, which is more efficient. So in short a cow and horse can both digest fiber. However their digestive systems have significant tradeoffs and one is not necessarily better than the other.
Fiber is healthy for us because we can’t digest it, so it bulks up our food without adding calories, and provides nutrients to our gut bacteria
Cows have an organ called a rumen that breaks down cellulose into carbohydrates, so they get way more calories from grass than we would. Surprisingly enough, though, horses also can’t digest fiber. Which is why I’ve always found it odd that they eat grass
Both cows, horses and even to a limited extent humans can digest fiber. Cows digest fiber in the rumen where it actually turns mostly into organic acids which the cow can oxidize while the anaerobic rumen bacteria cannot. Interestingly the same thing happens in the large intestine in other mammals. For humans the large intestine is quite small and food moves through there too quickly for much fiber to be properly digested. However the easiest digestible fiber, soluble fiber, actually mostly breaks down even in a human’s large intestine and yields us approximately 2 calories per gram of soluble fiber. For insoluble fiber this amount is extremely low since there is not enough fermentation taking place for it to be completely broken down. However for mammals with a much larger large intestine where food passes much slower, even the harder to digest fibers can be utilized to a large degree.
Horses belong to this category and are called hindgut fermenters. Other examples may surprise you like gorillas and orangutans who have incredibly huge large intestines. That’s why those apes can eat leaves all day and is an explanation why their stomachs are huge without them being filled with fat, it’s all intestines.
However a weakness with hindgut fermentation is that the large intestine can only extract solubles from the microbial mass which leaves out a lot of nutrients. A cow can extract those same organic acids from the fermentation but since the rumen is first in their digestive system the whole microbial mass enters their “ordinary” digestive system which means that they can digest the actual bacteria as well, meaning they manage to extract a bunch of extra microbial proteins that hindgut fermenters may miss. The benefit to hindgut fermentation is however that the first shot at digesting the food is given to the animal itself. A horse can digest starch just as well as a human could but a cow suffers considerable losses in starch digestion since the bacteria gets first gibs, turning the starch to organic acids instead of getting broken down into simple sugars directly, which is more efficient. So in short a cow and horse can both digest fiber. However their digestive systems have significant tradeoffs and one is not necessarily better than the other.
Thank you for random facts, that was kinda interesting to read and learn.
wow what a nice explanation. thank you.