Overview
About Chard
Chard is a beet relative, and like beet and spinach it carries oxalate: it grades moderate here, well below spinach but high enough to matter if you form calcium oxalate kidney stones or follow a low oxalate diet.
Everything else about it is unusually clean. It is low FODMAP across every subgroup, carries no histamine flag at all, and grades only mildly on salicylates and nickel.
Sensitivities
How Chard scores
Watch for
What trips people up
- Moderate oxalate. Not the extreme level spinach reaches, but enough that daily large servings are worth tracking if you have a stone history
- The green leaf blade holds far more oxalate than the pale stalk, so stems only is a genuinely lower oxalate way to eat it
- Mild salicylate and mild nickel content, dose dependent rather than a hard trigger for most people
- Boiling in plenty of water and pouring the water away takes a real share of the soluble oxalate with it. Sauteing and steaming do not
Diet fit
Where it fits
Swap ideas
More alternatives
FAQ
Common questions about Chard
Is chard high in oxalate?
It is moderate. Chard sits in the same plant family as beet and spinach and shares their oxalate habit, but it grades a step below spinach here rather than at the top of the scale. If you are managing calcium oxalate stones, the usual advice is to keep the portion sensible and to eat a calcium source in the same meal so the oxalate binds in the gut instead of in the kidney.
Are chard stems lower in oxalate than the leaves?
Yes. Oxalate concentrates in the green blade, so the thick white or coloured stalks are the milder part of the plant. Cooks who separate the two anyway for texture reasons are already doing the low oxalate version by accident.
Is chard low FODMAP?
Yes. It grades clean on fructans, GOS, polyols and excess fructose, which makes it one of the easier leafy greens for an irritable gut. If chard upsets you, the FODMAP content is unlikely to be the reason.
Can I eat chard on a low histamine diet?
Chard grades clean on both histamine content and histamine release, which separates it from spinach. Spinach is a standard exclusion on histamine intolerance protocols and chard is not, so it is a useful stand in when you want that cooked green flavour.
References
Read the background
Ratings reflect the Triggerbites ingredient database and may vary with portion size and preparation.