SPINACH: Vegetable rich in iron?. All the chemistry of this vegetable and curiosities.
Welcome to my blog Steemit Friends.
I hope you are very well, like me, today I come to share with you something that was quite present in my childhood and sure that in yours too. I'm talking about spinach, which is my favorite vegetable, and I'm not very fond of them. So you wonder how I can be a spinach lover if I do not like to eat vegetables?.
Image made by me.
But I always had the doubt that if there was something true behind this comedic, if it was true to eat spinach one grows healthier and less likely to get sick? ... well I thought it was like that because I have always heard from my grandmother to my mom that spinach is rich in iron, but good now that I study chemistry I could not stay with that doubt so I started to investigate and product of that research today I bring you this post that more than talk about spinach I want to tell you that there is truth in the spinach if it is rich in iron and especially if there was something true in the comedy of popeye.
So without more my friends put on the belts that we will travel again but for the world of science ...
Source: Popeye
Let's start with the myth that spinach is a rich food source in Iron.
Well I want to clarify that this myth is false. Spinach if it has a high iron content, 2.6mg of Fe per 100g of spinach (value that is very close to that of red meat) the percentage that our body manages to absorb 1.7% of that is, 0.0442mg of iron per 100g of spinach consumed, which compared to 20% of iron that is absorbed with red meat that has an iron content around 2.5mg is 0,5 mg of iron absorbed, we see that the iron content that we can absorb with spinach is quite low.
This low percentage of absorption is due to the way that iron is found in food, this can be heme, ie iron atoms bound in prosthetic groups (amino acids linked in the form of hetero proteins) or in non-heme form ie in iron atoms not bonded to prosthetic groups. The heme form can be found in foods of animal origin such as meat or eggs and the non-heme form in vegetables. Thus the heme form is easily absorbed and degraded by our organism while the non-heme form is absorbed with greater difficulty.
In the case of spinach it was thought for a long time that these compounds that accompanied the iron and generated a low absorption by our organism was the oxalic acid present in large quantities in the spine but recently it was demonstrated that the compounds responsible for this fact were in fact the phenolic compounds as the tannins present also present in large quantities in spinach, these compounds reduce the amount of iron to be absorbed by reacting with them and generate insoluble compounds. In addition to this effect, these compounds give a great antiradical and antioxidant activity to spinach.
Source: Spinach
- But just as spinach contains certain components that can reduce the percentage of iron we absorb, we can consume other foods that together with spinach increase the percentage of iron we can absorb from it. The best compound for this task is the famous vitamin C present in oranges and many other foods.
We have already clarified the issue of iron content in spinach, we will talk about Popeye.
- This was also a victim of the myth of iron in spinach and I also thought it was for this reason that Popeye ate spinach, but it is not, as the creator of the animated series Elzie Segar issued that this was not the reason why Popeye ate spinach but because of the vitamins A it contained, but in fact spinach is not rich in vitamin A but in carotenes such as beta-carotene, which are precursors of the vitamin A so in any case if it is a good way to get vitamin A from the intake of spinach.
Image made by me.
Source: Popeye
Well friends I am glad to have shared with you this important aspect in my life and that science can solve another question of our daily life, I hope you have learned something good, just like me. I wait for you in a next post and may the force accompany you.
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