Lies they told me about spinach

I think of them now as the Spinach Conversations They were more like wars to be honest and my mother always won because mothers always win I was just a Palakkad child what could I possibly know about nutritionldquoEat your spinachrdquo shersquod say trying to sound ominous ldquoItrsquos good for yourdquoldquoItrsquos just a boiled leafrdquo Irsquod say ldquoI donrsquot like the tasterdquoldquoItrsquos full of ironrdquo shersquod say and usually that would be the clinching argument Growing kids need muscles and muscles need iron But I donrsquot give up easilyldquoIt makes my teeth feel like chalkrdquo Irsquod say and in the beginning this would make her pause But it wasnrsquot long before she came up with a rejoinder ldquoWell your baby teeth will fall off soon anyway and yoursquoll get new onesrdquoOne day I discovered Popeye comics Popeye was a pipesmoking funnyspeaking emotional sailor who was regularly beaten up by his girlfriend Olive Oil and a thug called Bluto Then hersquod secretly eat some spinach from a can and his biceps would bulge like spuds Then it would be wham bam slam and Bluto got beaten to pulpPopeye more than my mother was scientific proof for me that spinach did contain iron I ate a lot of spinach for iron back then though I remained skinny and lanky We also ate hateful carrots because their vitamin A was good for eyes green beans because they had proteins and milk because of the calciumAs an adult I continued eating spinach When I had children I had the Spinach Conversations with them ldquoSpinach is good for yourdquo I told them ldquoItrsquos full of ironrdquoNow that my children are both adults and we have a thing called Google Search I asked the question I hadnrsquot dared ask till now Is spinach really a source of ironThe answer seems deceptively straightforward itrsquos yes to start with A food can be called a source of iron if 100 gms contain at least 15 per cent of the recommended daily intake or RDI of ironIronrsquos RDI is 14 mg and 15 per cent of that is 21 mg Spinach luckily has about 26 mg of iron per 100 mg which makes it legally a source of iron In comparison sirloin steak has only 25 mg of iron per 100 mg less than spinachSo Popeye was right My mother was right Is spinach better than steakWhen in doubt scroll Further down the page I saw the word bioavailability Turns out that though spinach may have lots of iron itrsquos packed up inside polyphenol compounds and your body can absorb a mere 17 per cent of it or 0044 mg On the other hand the bioavailability of iron in sirloin steak is 20 per cent or 05 mgNutshell spinach has iron but your body gets precious little of itYou know what they say about knowledge Good answers lead to better questions My next one was how on earth did spinach get linked with ironWhen in doubt you can always blame the Germans In this case they pinned the blame on Erich von Wolf who was researching spinach in 1870 and accidentally put the decimal point in the wrong place turning 035 mg into 35 mg a tenfold increase Almost overnight spinach became a miracle foodIn 1929 the cartoonist Elzie Segar introduced a skinny oddball sailor called Popeye into a comic series called Thimble Theatre The source of Popeyersquos superpower was spinach eating it made his muscles bulge and he could beat anyone up Popeye was soon a national favourite and the comic strip got renamed after him Meanwhile the sales of spinach shot up 33 per cent in the 1930s saving Americarsquos spinach industry and making it one of the worldrsquos most popular vegetables powered by one of the worldrsquos most durable mythsmdashthat it was a great source of musclebuilding ironI love the motto of the Royal Society in London Nullius in verba or ldquotake nobodyrsquos word for itrdquo It asks for scepticism even of experts So I kept scrollingEven the socalled lsquotruthsrsquo about spinach were balderdash The decimal point error could just not be proven In 1937 scientists tried to set the record straight but too late people preferred Popeyersquos version In 1981 Terry Hamblin a haematology consultant at the Royal Victoria Hospital wrote in the British Medical Journal again drawing attention to the typoAnother researcher found that E C Segar made Popeye a spinachlover because of its vitamin A not its ironBut nothing changed People believed what they wanted Spinach remained kingI eat spinach because few dishes are as satisfying for a south Indian as a poduthuval of quickfried spinach with coconut curry leaves red chillies and a garnish of mustard and urad dalMy teeth still feel like chalk afterwards but now I know thatrsquos because my teeth are coated with calcium oxalate created when the oxalic acid and calcium ions in spinach interact with my salivaNothing that canrsquot be fixed by brushing your teethHere viewed from there C Y Gopinath in Bangkok throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai the city that raised him You can reach him at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper