can gerbils eat spinach

Can Gerbils Eat Spinach?

Spinach is a widely cultivated edible Asian plant that comes form the goosefoot family. It has large, dark green leaves that are eaten raw or cooked as a vegetable.

They eaten in many different culinary dishes around the world.

So can gerbils eat spinach at all?


In particular, their acidic, water, fat, calcium, sugar, salt, and phosphorus content is of interest as far as gerbils are concerned. This is because it is these nutrients that affect gerbils the most in the foods that they eat.

Nutritional value per 100 g (3.5 oz)
Energy 97 kJ (23 kcal)
3.6 g
Sugars 0.4 g
Dietary fiber 2.2 g
0.4 g
2.9 g
Vitamin A equiv.
lutein zeaxanthin
(59%) 469 μg
(52%) 5626 μg
12198 μg
Vitamin A 9377 IU
Thiamine (B1) (7%) 0.078 mg
Riboflavin (B2) (16%) 0.189 mg
Niacin (B3) (5%) 0.724 mg
Vitamin B6 (15%) 0.195 mg
Folate (B9) (49%) 194 μg
Vitamin C (34%) 28 mg
Vitamin E (13%) 2 mg
Vitamin K (460%) 483 μg
Calcium (10%) 99 mg
Iron (21%) 2.71 mg
Magnesium (22%) 79 mg
Manganese (43%) 0.897 mg
Phosphorus (7%) 49 mg
Potassium (12%) 558 mg
Sodium (5%) 79 mg
Zinc (6%) 0.53 mg
Other constituents
Water 91.4 g

source wikipedia

As you can see Spinach contains a lot of phosphorus, calcium, acidic content and huge amount of water.

This means that unfortunately they can’t eat spinach as it has too much water and acidic content for them to handle. Gerbils cannot eat vegetables or fruit that have too much water as they give them diarrhea. They just cannot handle water based foods like we can.

This makes spinach a food to avoid as far as gerbils are concerned.