can guinea pigs eat amaranth

Can Guinea Pigs Eat Amaranth?

Amaranth is a collective of annual or short lived perennial plants.

Their greens are a common leaf vegetable throughout the tropics and in many warm temperate regions.

So can guinea pigs eat amaranth and if they can how much of it can they eat?

Lets take a look at their nutritional data and find out a lot more about it.

In particular, its calcium, sugar, fat, phosphorus, and acidic content are most pertinent to guinea pigs.

image wikipedia

Amaranth, uncooked
Nutritional value per 100 g (3.5 oz)
Energy 1,554 kJ (371 kcal)
Carbohydrates 65.25 g
– Starch 57.27 g
– Sugars 1.69 g
– Dietary fiber 6.7 g
Fat 7.02 g
– saturated 1.459 g
– monounsaturated 1.685 g
– polyunsaturated 2.778 g
Protein 13.56 g
– Tryptophan 0.181 g
– Threonine 0.558 g
– Isoleucine 0.582 g
– Leucine 0.879 g
– Lysine 0.747 g
– Methionine 0.226 g
– Cystine 0.191 g
– Phenylalanine 0.542 g
– Tyrosine 0.329 g
– Valine 0.679 g
– Arginine 1.060 g
– Histidine 0.389 g
– Alanine 0.799 g
– Aspartic acid 1.261 g
– Glutamic acid 2.259 g
– Glycine 1.636 g
– Proline 0.698 g
– Serine 1.148 g
Thiamine (vit. B1) 0.116 mg (10%)
Riboflavin (vit. B2) 0.2 mg (17%)
Niacin (vit. B3) 0.923 mg (6%)
Pantothenic acid (B5) 1.457 mg (29%)
Vitamin B6 0.591 mg (45%)
Folate (vit. B9) 82 μg (21%)
Vitamin C 4.2 mg (5%)
Vitamin E 1.19 mg (8%)
Calcium 159 mg (16%)
Iron 7.61 mg (59%)
Magnesium 248 mg (70%)
Manganese 3.333 mg (159%)
Phosphorus 557 mg (80%)
Potassium 508 mg (11%)
Sodium 4 mg (0%)
Zinc 2.87 mg (30%)

source wikipedia

As you can see amaranth contains quite a bit of calcium, quite a bit of fat, but so much phosphorus in it.

It is definitely a food that guinea pigs should avoid at all costs.

One thought on “Can Guinea Pigs Eat Amaranth?

  1. Is this data for Grain Amaranth or Leaf Amaranth. 65% carbohydrate sounds like grain to me. I don’t want to feed Amaranth grain to my Guinea Pigs. Amaranth is one of the few greens to thrive in warm wet weather so would be a useful summer feed to supply vitamin C to my Guinea Pigs.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *