Is spinach packed with iron?
You sit at the lunch table with your school lunch. The air is filled with the indulging smell of herby pizza. You prefer something a lot more healthier, which is a pizza with the bread made out of spinach. Sounds weird, but you want to get extra strong for tennis. You glance at the other school lunches. One kid has a spinach wrap and other has pickled spinach which smells like your socks after tennis. On the bright yellow poster, in front of the spinach pizzas being served out, it shows the word spinach with the word iron going through it. You then take a second to wonder, is spinach packed with iron? Lets pop this balloon to find out!
What is spinach?
Spinach is the leafy green of the Spinacia oleracea plant. As the leaves, spinach captures sunlight to make the plant's energy. Spinach is rich in Vitamin K1, folate, iron, and antioxidants. The body also converts the beta-carotene in spinach to Vitamin A. Spinach is only about 7 calories per cup of raw leaves. It comes in several types, including crinkly savoy, flat leaf, and red-veined. Spinach first came from ancient Persia. In the 1930s, the cartoon Popeye made it famous as a strength food. Spinach takes about 40-50 days to grow fully.
Is spinach packed with iron?
This myth is technically true. Spinach is packed with iron, about 2.7mg per 100g of spinach raw. This is a lot more compared to other plants. Although, it is a non-heme iron, which means it absorbs into our body poorly. Spinach is also full of oxalic acid, which plants use to manage excess calcium. The oxalic acid binds with the iron and blocks uptake. So you only take a small amount of iron the label says. You can get more iron out of your spinach by taking it with vitamin C alongside it (lemon, peppers, tomato) and cooking, which breaks down some of the oxalic acid. Tea, coffee and calcium lessens the amount of iron in spinach. Spinach is not the powerhouse of iron, but has some that you can’t reach. This myth most likely came from two different sources. The first source is how German chemists in the 1800’s analyzed the differences between dried versus fresh spinach. Dried spinach has more iron by weight, since all the water from the spinach was removed. Two correct measurements of different things, both reported as "spinach” caused the confusion. The second source is Popeye. The cartoon sailor ate spinach and got strong, and it worked — spinach sales rose and he became the public face of the vegetable. But Segar, his creator, never said anything about iron. The evidence points to vitamin A as the reason he picked it. Most people find that Popeyes became strong because of iron.
Fun Facts
There's a statue of Popeye in Crystal City, Texas, put up by spinach growers. Popeye's creator never mentioned iron. The evidence points to vitamin A. An entire global belief about iron grew out of a cartoon that wasn't about iron. Cooked spinach beats raw for iron, calcium, magnesium, beta-carotene, and lutein. Heat breaks the cell walls and releases nutrients the oxalic acid had bound up.
Sources
McGill Office for Science and Society – "Setting the Facts Straight About Iron in Spinach"
CooksInfo – "Spinach"
https://www.cooksinfo.com/spinach
Mashed – "The Untold Truth Of Spinach"
