Bok choy, also known as pak choi, is a variety of Chinese cabbage that is a safe leafy vegetable for your guinea pigs to eat, along with a mix of other fresh veggies. Let’s look at what nutrition this Chinese leaf offers your guinea pigs and how often it is safe to feed bok choy to your pets.
What is bok choy?
Bok choy is a type of Chinese cabbage, although it doesn’t look like the vegetables we know as cabbages in the western world. Although you may not have heard of this vegetable, it is widely available in most supermarkets.
Is bok choy high in fibre?
Boy choy is quite low in fibre with about the same amount as a red leaf lettuce or butterhead lettuce. In fact, savoy cabbages have about 3 times as much fibre and white and red cabbages have twice as much fibre as bok choy.
How much vitamin C is in bok choy?
Although this Chinese leaf doesn’t score well on fibre, it does much better when it comes to the vitamin C content.
Bok choy has about the same amount of this essential vitamin as an orange per 100g. This is good news as vitamin C is an extremely important nutrient in a guinea pig’s diet.
Can bok choy cause bloat in guinea pigs?
Bok Choy is a member of the cruciferous family and this is the sort of vegetable that can lead to bloat in guinea pigs if they are fed this type of food too much or too often.
Bloat is an extremely dangerous condition in a guinea pig and we need to be careful when feeding Chinese cabbage or any other cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage or broccoli to our small pets.
This doesn’t mean your guinea pigs can’t eat bok choy, but we need to limit the amount they have, and make sure there are plenty of other less gassy vegetables in their daily fresh food portion.
How much sugar is in bok choy?
Bok Choy has just over 1g of sugar per 100g and this is lower than many other vegetables.
Too much sugar in a guinea pig’s diet can cause serious health problems so it’s important to be careful about how many sugary fruit and veggies your guinea pigs eat.
Bok choy has half as much sugar as a green bell pepper and considerably less than red and yellow bell peppers.
How much bok choy can guinea pigs eat and how often?
Bok Choy has a good amount of vitamin C and is low in sugar. But the fibre content is also low, which is not so good. Eating too much bok choy could lead to bloat, so we do need to be careful about how much of this vegetable our guinea pigs eat.
It’s ok to feed 3-4 times a week, providing you give it to your guinea pigs in small quantities. We always recommend you feed a good variety of as many different vegetables or foraged weeds each day and throughout the week so your guinea pigs get a good balance of nutrients.
A good daily diet will help them stay healthy and will reduce the chances of them getting nasty diseases.
Nutritional information for bok choy
Below is the nutritional value per 100g of bok choy
- Vitamin C: 45 mg
- Calcium: 105 mg
- Phosphorous: 37 mg
- Fibre: 1 g
- Sugar: 1.2 g