It's hard to write about spinach without going the Popeye route, so let me just get it out of the way: Are you really strong to the finish if you eats your spinach? Pretty much! On the vitamin and mineral front, spinach is a real superpower and holds a spot on most lists of the top ten most nutritious vegetables. Vitamin A, calcium, vitamin C...it's got it all.
I fully expected to hate spinach, but I've found I don't really mind a bit of spinach mixed in with other greens in a salad. Gerry likes to use spinach in egg dishes for some extra color and nutrition.
So what about the Popeye claim? Well, the Wikipedia entry for spinach specifically adresses this!
The cartoon character Popeye the Sailor Man is portrayed as having a strong affinity for spinach, becoming physically stronger after consuming it. A frequently circulated story claims that this portrayal was based on faulty calculations of the iron content. In the story, German scientist Emil von Wolff misplaced a decimal point in an 1870 measurement of spinach's iron content, leading to an iron value 10 times higher than it should have been and this faulty measurement was not noticed until the 1930s. However, recent study has shown that this is just another long standing myth, and spinach was chosen and promoted in Popeye for its vitamin A content alone.
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