Sunday, March 24, 2013

3.4 Popeye's spinach

Only one cartoon character eats vegetables before fighting bad guys — Popeye. Whenever he needs some quick muscles, he just eats some spinach.  However, Popeye’s love of spinach was based on a mistake! 
In 1870, a German doctor said that spinach had lots of iron, even more than red meat. But he had made a mathematical mistake, and put a decimal point in the wrong place. This made spinach seem ten times richer in iron than it really is. In 1937 someone finally corrected this mistake. But Popeye couldn’t stop. By then he had been eating spinach for ten years!
Spinach doesn’t really have more iron than other green vegetables, like broccoli for example. And actually the iron in spinach is a little difficult to digest. Although spinach is healthy, since it has lots of Vitamin C, it’s not the best food for building big muscles.


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