Formulation and ingredients
Active (active ingredient) — the ingredient included to do the product's job, as distinct from carriers, binders and flavourings. Our actives library profiles the ones we work with.
Bioavailability — how much of an ingested nutrient actually reaches the tissues that can use it. The reason curcumin formulation matters and raw turmeric mostly doesn't.
Chelated mineral — a trace element bound to amino acids or peptides to protect it through digestion, typically improving absorption over plain mineral salts. See zinc.
Standardised extract — a botanical extract manufactured to a declared percentage of its active constituents, so every batch delivers the same amount. The difference between studied Boswellia and ground resin of unknown strength.
Excipient / carrier — the non-active materials that give a product its physical form, stability and dosability.
Palatant — a flavour system added so the animal willingly eats the product. In animal nutrition, palatability is part of the dose — a refused supplement delivers nothing.
Proprietary blend — a labelling practice listing a mixture's total weight without individual amounts. Lawful, but it prevents dose evaluation, which is why we don't use it.
Fairy-dust inclusion — industry slang for adding a fashionable active at a fraction of studied levels so it can appear on the label. The practice our dose-honesty rule exists to oppose.
Evidence and testing
Peer-reviewed — research published after scrutiny by independent qualified reviewers. The admission standard for our formulation library.
Placebo-controlled — a study design comparing the product against an inactive equivalent, so improvement can be attributed to the product rather than expectation or time. How our trials are built.
Blinding — keeping those scoring outcomes unaware of which animal received the product, to neutralise the caregiver placebo effect.
Caregiver placebo effect — the well-documented tendency of owners and handlers who expect improvement to perceive it. The single best argument for controlled trials in animal products.
Principal investigator (PI) — the person with scientific and welfare authority over a study; in our trials, always a veterinary surgeon.
Outcome measure — the pre-agreed thing a trial counts: a validated mobility score, production data, a laboratory marker. Fixed before enrolment so success can't be redefined afterwards.
Manufacturing and quality
GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) — the discipline of controlled, documented production: qualified materials, defined processes, in-process checks, batch records, finished-product verification. What our manufacturing runs under.
Certificate of analysis (CoA) — a supplier's or laboratory's documented test results for a specific material batch — identity, purity, potency. Trust, replaced with paperwork.
Batch traceability — the ability to trace any finished unit back through production to every raw material lot it contains, and forward to where the batch went.
Premix — a concentrated, uniform blend of actives and micro-ingredients designed for dilution into feed at mill or farm — the standard delivery vehicle in agricultural nutrition.
Stability / shelf life — evidence that a product still meets its label claims at the end of its stated life. Especially demanding for oils and live organisms.
CFU (colony-forming units) — the count of viable micro-organisms; the dose unit of probiotics and live yeast. The honest number is the guaranteed count at end of shelf life.
Regulation and categories
Complementary feed — the feed-law category most supplements legally occupy: products fed alongside a diet rather than as the whole of it. See the regulation guide.
Feed additive — a substance authorised for use in animal feed for a defined purpose — vitamins, trace elements, micro-organisms — sometimes with legal maximum levels, as with selenium.
PARNUT — shorthand for the "particular nutritional purposes" framework: a defined list of permitted specific-purpose statements a feed may make under set compositional conditions.
VMD (Veterinary Medicines Directorate) — the UK regulator of veterinary medicines, and the authority governing the boundary supplements must not cross: treating or preventing disease.
ASA / CAP — the UK's advertising regulator and its codes; the substantiation rules all supplement marketing answers to.
Zootechnical additive — a feed-additive category for substances that favourably affect performance or wellbeing — a status requiring demonstrated effect, held by certain live yeast strains.
Statutory statement — the legally required block of label information on a feed: composition, additives, feeding instructions and more, in prescribed formats.
Nutrition terms worth having straight
Nutraceutical — informal industry term for a nutrition product positioned to support health; not a legal category in UK feed or medicines law.
Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) — the long, water-binding molecules that give cartilage its cushioning; the family chondroitin belongs to.
EPA / DHA — the long-chain marine omega-3 fatty acids carrying most of the veterinary evidence; the numbers that matter on any omega-3 label.
Hindgut fermentation — the horse's digestive strategy: microbial fibre fermentation in the caecum and colon. The reason equine gut support centres on fermentation stability.
Rumen — the fermentation chamber of cattle and sheep, whose microbial stability underwrites productivity; the workplace of live yeast.
Oral tolerance — the immune mechanism by which small oral amounts of a protein teach the immune system not to react to it; the proposed basis of undenatured type II collagen's action.