I do think it is quite beneficial.
If you are freezing wet and cold but have some stinging nettle handy rub it on your freezing hands and they will warm up. I plant it and grow it and pinch the tender leaves off and wash them. Then I cook them in a covered pot with some water. When the leaves are done I add a teaspoon of Margarine and a table spoon of sour cream to it and eat away. Butter tastes awful in this recipe so stick with margarine which I usually hate, but it's good in this. I also pinch off the tender tiny shoots and roll them between my thumb and forefinger to mush the sting out and eat them raw. I learned this awesome food stuff as I researched for a term paper in a class on wildflowers. I chose edible wild plants and had so much fun in doing the research. If things got bad on this planet but someone knew where to get cattails, they could eat away on them. The tender white part is edible raw. The green tail part that later turns to brown fuzz can be boiled and eaten in the same manner you would eat an ear of corn including butter and salt... just don't expect it to taste like corn at all. Stinging nettle has more iron and vitamins than spinach. I think it's tastier too and prefer it to spinach any day. If you need a composted brew (although us chicken rearing mommas have tons of chickity doo doo )take the older stems and leaves of stinging nettle and put them in a bucket of water and cover. In a couple weeks you will have a mineral rich compost tea that your plants will really love. It does however stink something awful, but the plants don't care. I would think if we can eat it, the chickens can too with no problem. 1 cup of cooked stinging nettles has only 2.4 grams of protein and very few carbs. It's high in calcium and iron. 1 cup for humans is 30- 40% of our daily requirement of calcium and 1,790 units of vitamins A. It is also rich in vitamin K needed for blood clotting and strong bones since it works with vitamin D and calcium in bone growth. With all of these added benefits I haven't even begun to mention it's a very rich source of B vitamins. So well, nettles don't have significant amounts of proteins and carbs, but it's like taking a natural source of a good quality multi vitamin with minerals. Chickens don't have the receptors that sense hot peppers, but I have no clue if they can sense the "sting" of stinging nettles. It's a chemical in the little hairy fibers that does it. Cooking destroys it, and so does crushing it. I have eaten it so long that I think mostly I am immune to the sting. I am not the only person who learned to pinch a tiny sprig of stinging nettles and roll it between my forefinger and thumb to remove the sting. Doing this was a boost to my body when out hiking and it was going to take too long to get back to camp when the hunger pangs started. When I've been wet and cold and no warmth was soon coming, stinging nettle warmed me up and by the time I got to warmth the sting had mostly worn off. It made walking the distance a bit more tolerable.
with 2.4 grams of protein per cup, how compressed is this stuff to get almost 2 cup of nettles into little chicks? Any animal with diseased kidneys is getting too much salt. I did research on nettle and compared it to spinach, It leaves spinach in the dust as far as nutrition, and in my personal opinion on flavor too. If there is zero cholesterol in nettles how does an animal get hypercholesterolemia from it. Did they even mention if it is the HDL cholesterol or the LDL cholesterol? If a person had to have hypercholesterolemia it would be awesome to have increased HDL (high density lipoproteins) cholesterol, because that stuff reams out arteries. The LDL (low density lipoproteins) smears itself all over the arteries and clogs them up.
