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Old 11-08-06, 03:37 am
jabberwock jabberwock is offline
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Re: Cavy Nutrition Charts Discussion Thread

First of all - thank you very much for the list, it's really useful and I think the colours are fine.

But, some comments/questions on chard that continue to confuse me:
I am curious as to why chard is OK every day and beet greens only very occasionally as the two plants are very closely related. If you do some googling on "Swiss Chard oxalic acid" you get a string of results all saying that chard has high levels of oxalic acid. So maybe it's not a good idea to feed it every day? There are no oxalic acid figures for chard in the USDA analysis on which I assume the guinea lynx charts were based, and I guess this is why chard isn't on the guinea lynx oxalic acid list.
But if you look at this link
Oxalic Acid and Foods
then chard has very similar oxalic acid levels to beet greens as you might expect. Interestingly this table seems to show that different ("apparently trustworthy") groups analysing oxalic acid levels get enormously different results (look at carrots).

I'm not trying to be difficult, I am genuinely very confused. I also realise that oxalic acid levels vary with the age of the plant so I tend to feed young, small leaves 2 or 3 times a week and the very large leaves never. But maybe I'm being too cautious?

I did ask similar questions on a thread several months ago, but I was the only person to reply to myself!
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