Overview
About Mizuna
Mizuna is the feathery, faintly peppery Japanese green that makes up a large share of the average bag of mixed salad leaves.
It is one of the cleanest rows in this whole database: graded low FODMAP outright, with every FODMAP subgroup, oxalate, histamine, tyramine, nickel, sulfite, nitrite, gluten, lactose and glutamate all clean. The single grade that is not top marks is a borderline on salicylates, and histamine liberation is unrated rather than flagged. If you are working through an elimination diet and you want a leaf you can build a salad on without arithmetic, this is a strong candidate.
Sensitivities
How Mizuna scores
Watch for
What trips people up
- Borderline on salicylates, and that is the only trigger grade above clean on the page. It is a mild peppery leaf rather than a bland one, and pepperiness tracks salicylate loosely, so on a strict salicylate elimination it goes in the middle tier rather than the free tier.
- Histamine liberation is unrated, not cleared. Histamine content itself is graded clean, so mizuna is not an amine source, but if you react to a salad you have not eliminated the leaf as a liberator by pointing at that grade.
- What you dress it with usually outranks the leaf. Mizuna is almost always eaten under a vinaigrette, a sesame dressing or with cheese, cured meat and pickles, all of which carry far heavier trigger loads. Log the salad, not the green.
- It is a brassica, so raw daily bulk brings the usual thyroid question. Cooking mizuna cuts its glucosinolate load, and normal salad amounts are not the scenario the goitrogen literature is concerned with.
Diet fit
Where it fits
Swap ideas
More alternatives
FAQ
Common questions about Mizuna
Is mizuna low FODMAP?
Yes. Mizuna is graded low FODMAP overall and clean on all five subgroups: fructans, GOS, fruit sugar, polyols and lactose. That makes it one of the more useful salad leaves during an elimination phase, because it gives you volume and a bit of flavour without the portion arithmetic that follows most vegetables around.
Is mizuna high in oxalate?
No, and this is the point worth remembering about it. Mizuna is graded clean on oxalate, which is unusual for a leafy green and is exactly where spinach and chard get into trouble. If you are building salads under a low oxalate protocol for kidney stones, mizuna is one of the leaves that does not need rationing.
What is the difference between mizuna and arugula?
Both are peppery brassica salad leaves, but mizuna is much milder and its heat fades quickly after cutting, while arugula stays sharp and gets sharper as the plant ages. In trigger terms mizuna is the safer of the two to lean on: it is graded clean across the FODMAP subgroups and on oxalate, with only a borderline salicylate grade, which means fewer variables to control when you are testing something else in the same meal.
References
Read the background
Ratings reflect the Triggerbites ingredient database and may vary with portion size and preparation.