Popeye credited spinach with vitamin A, not the famous iron
Everyone assumes Popeye's muscles came from iron in spinach. Yet in a 1932 strip the sailor himself says spinach is full of vitamin A, and spinach is no better an iron source than many other vegetables. The belief that it is packed with iron has become a textbook example of an academic urban legend.
Spinacia oleracea is a leafy annual in the amaranth family, native to Central and Western Asia, rarely taller than 30 centimetres. Unlike most vegetable crops it is dioecious, meaning individual plants bear either male or female flowers, and its tiny green blooms are pollinated by wind. The family it was long filed under, Chenopodiaceae, was folded into Amaranthaceae in 2003.
Its likely birthplace, roughly two millennia back, spans parts of Iran and the Indian subcontinent, and from there it travelled to China by way of Nepal. Arabs brought it to Sicily in 827, and three tenth-century Arabic works, including one by al-Rāzī, give the first written Mediterranean records. In twelfth-century Iberia, Ibn al-ʻAwwām called it the chieftain of leafy greens. By the fourteenth century it had reached England and France, prized because it sprouts in early spring before other fresh greens, and the 1390 cookbook Forme of Cury spells it spynoches. The English name runs back through Old French, medieval Latin and Andalusian Arabic to Persian aspānākh.
A 100 gram serving of raw spinach is 91 percent water and supplies about four times the daily value of vitamin K. It also holds oxalates, which reduce how much calcium and iron the body absorbs; blanching lowers them, while heat destroys much of the vitamin C. Stored fresh, even under refrigeration for about eight days, it loses most of its folate and carotenoids, which is why much of the crop is canned or frozen. During World War I, injured French soldiers were given wine fortified with spinach juice in hopes of slowing bleeding.
In 2024 the world grew 31 million tonnes, and China produced 92 percent of it. Kitchens use it everywhere, from saag paneer and Georgian pkhali to Greek spanakopita, and classical French menus label spinach dishes à la Florentine.
Source: Spinach
