Will eating spinach make me strong?
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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 -
If i tell you by eating my crap, you could be stronger and smarter, would you ?
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when i was younger..i truly believed that eating spinach would make me stronger...
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he mightOriginally posted by rathcycle:If i tell you by eating my crap, you could be stronger and smarter, would you ?
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wow, take them so long to know that?
mi know long long time ago already -
I heard that Popeye's cartoon was created in such a way that Popeye would get strong muscles when he consumed spinach to encourage young american kids to eat more vegetables, because most of them are fat and do not eat much greens.
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u have to squeeze the tin can and make the spinach in the can fly up and eat the spinach with ur pipe then u will get the full effect.
if u are not able to do that then forget about spinach and move on to other vegs. -
I used 2 believe when i am young. Now tat i had aged so much tat i begin 2 ....shall i believe... 
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But why is spinach not recommended for people with high URIC acid content? I believe uric acid is related to gout. So, this is one bad point for spinach.