Will eating spinach make me strong?
The Popeye effect
By Dr Stephen JuanPublished Friday 18th August 2006 11:37 GMT
Asked by Thomas Glass of Hartford, Connecticut, USA
The Popeye Effect is the belief that eating spinach will give you
big muscles. Unfortunately, this is a myth.
Just eating spinach is not going to make anyone as strong as the
cartoon character, Popeye. If it did, body-builders and athletes
would be popping tins of spinach as often as Popeye did in his
cartoons. Come to think of it, Bluto would be eating spinach
too!
The fact is that many other nutritional supplements build muscle
bulk and strength faster and more effectively than spinach.
However, it is often true that people with weak muscles have a
variety of vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
"Spinach" derives from the Latin word spina meaning "spine".
Spinach is a vegetarian, low-calorie, non-animal source of iron and
magnesium. Both are essential to muscle development. Spinach also
contains vitamin C, vitamin B-9 (folate, folic acid), and
additional antioxidants that the conventional wisdom in human
nutrition claims helps prevent cancer. All of these are beneficial
to the body.
Dr Shawn Somerset of the School of Public Health at Griffith
University in Brisbane, Australia, points out that a difficulty in
over-relying upon spinach as a source of iron is that spinach is
rather poorly absorbed by the body unless eaten with calcium. The
type of iron found in spinach is non-blood (non-heme), a plant
iron, which the body does not absorb as efficiently as blood (heme)
iron, found in meat.
The myth of the Popeye Effect dates back to a real scientific
mistake. In 1870, Dr E von Wolf mistakenly misplaced a decimal
point and wrongly estimated the iron content of spinach to be 10
times more than any other green vegetable. The mistake was
corrected only in 1937. But by then it was too late. The first
Popeye cartoons appeared in 1929 - and the spinach-muscles-strength
legend was already born.
Health benefits of spinach
The idea that spinach makes you strong relates to its iron content.
Iron is essential for transporting oxygen from the lungs to the
muscles and for storing oxygen in the muscles.
Health benefits of spinach include:
Protecting against heart disease
Helping prevent colon and prostate cancer
Maintaining good eye health
Reducing chances of brain damage after a stroke
Helping preserve healthy bones
