🔴 200-500 mg Oxalate in Vegetables — 9 Foods

Vegetables are the widest-oxalate-spread food group in the database: a cucumber measures around 1 mg of oxalate per serving while a half-cup of cooked spinach approaches 493 mg. That spread is why blanket advice like 'eat more vegetables' does not work for stone patients. What matters is the specific leaf, the serving, and the preparation. Boiling and draining can remove a meaningful share of soluble oxalate from many greens, and pairing any higher-oxalate vegetable with a calcium-rich food at the same meal reduces absorption. Low-oxalate anchors in this group include cucumber, lettuce, and most squash varieties; the leafy dark greens are the ones to portion carefully.

Browsing by oxalate range adds precision that a broad verdict cannot. Two foods can both be rated Safe, yet one sits at 3 mg and the other at 24 mg — a meaningful difference when you are tracking a daily oxalate budget. This view groups foods by their exact milligram bracket, which makes daily tracking and meal planning more accurate. Use it alongside the verdict for a go/no-go signal plus the number for fine-tuning.

Inside this 200-500 mg Oxalate bracket for Vegetables: the 9 foods span from 226.0 mg to 493.0 mg per serving, with Spinach at the top end. Leading entries: Good King Henry, Huazontle (Aztec broccoli), Nopal (Prickly Pear) and 6 more. This is the precision layer that a broad verdict cannot show — two foods in this range can sit several milligrams apart, which matters when you track a daily total.

A single serving from this bracket can run five to ten times a conservative daily oxalate target — these are the most concentrated plant-oxalate sources in the food supply, and the values here are exactly why generic healthy-eating advice fails stone patients: some of the most nutrient-dense greens on earth sit in this range. The issue is never whether these foods are healthy in general; it is that their oxalate density overwhelms a daily budget in one sitting.

For most stone patients the practical stance is simple: these are not everyday foods, and the burden of proof sits with inclusion. If there is a specific reason to eat one — a dish you love, a cultural staple — the full toolkit applies: small measured portions, boiling with the water discarded (which can cut soluble oxalate dramatically for greens), calcium taken with the meal, and a deliberately near-zero day around it. Anyone repeatedly eating foods from this bracket, or with high urinary oxalate on follow-up testing, should be discussing portion reality with their care team rather than relying on willpower.