It is generally accepted that spinach is a champion among plants in the content of iron. We checked if it was true.
“Spinach is a real storehouse of useful substances, but most of all it is valued for the high iron content,” - It is said On the website of the influential fund Louis Bondyul. In an article from the American magazine "Progressive Medicine" for 1924 Approvedthat 100 g of spinach contains 35 mg of iron. IN dissertation “The nutritional value and culinary and technological properties of the main leafy vegetables”, protected in 1983, can be found: “The high content of chlorophyll, folic acid and iron determines the use of spinach as a therapeutic agent for some blood diseases.” Biochemist Hidaia Aliush from the University of Manchester in the article 2021 Curses a range of 4–35 mg of iron per 100 g of spinach, which is much higher average indicators for other plant products.
In the body of an adult healthy person Contained About 3-5 g of iron, however, 1-2 mg of this trace element is excreted from the body daily - with later, urine, and sometimes with blood. Daily need An adult in iron does not exceed 15 mg on average, and if it is not replenished, you can encounter a disease such as anemia. With the latter, the formation of the skeleton, the functions of the central nervous and vascular systems are impaired, hypoxia in the tissues is observed.
The main source of iron in the body is food. The average daily diet of a person contains enough this trace element to satisfy all the needs of the body. However, during the period of intensive growth, pregnancy or lactation, this amount may not be enough. Typically, a list of products with a high iron content can be seen in all kinds of reference books and thematic articles.
Here are just the numbers that we see in the reference books are usually deceiving. It is one thing - the amount of iron coming with food, the other is a learned share. Here other components of the food product are already entering into business. For example, a negative role can play the presence of oxalic acid in it. The proteins contained in legumes are especially inhibited: here absorption is only 0.8–1.9%. From meat products absorbed About 30% of the iron contained there, while from grain - only 5-10%. In this case, initially, iron in meat is smaller than, for example, in beans. Also known happeningWhen patients with iron deficiency anemia were fed raw beef, treated with gastric juice of a healthy person, and they recovered, despite the fact that separately these components did not give such an effect. There are a lot of other influencing factors - for example, iron valency.
What about spinach? If we look at Modern tables, then we will see that the leaves of this plant contain as a whole a considerable, but far from a fantastic amount of iron - about 2–3.5 mg, that is, at the level of many vegetables and much less than in legumes or a number of cereals. Add a high content here oxalic acid, which makes the use of spinach raw relatively ineffective in terms of replenishing iron deficiency. Where did the information about 35 mg come from?
Very often writethat an error on the content of iron in Spinata appeared many years ago, when when publishing an article with chemical analysis data, a comma was accidentally shifted to one position to the right. Accordingly, the result of the analysis was overstated exactly ten times. The version of the typo has become widely known. It is even given as an example of how important it is to critically approach the published data.
The history of this myth at one time was interested in forensic scientist Mike Sutton from the University of Nottingham. The intermediate result of his work was a 34-page studyPublished in 2010, to which seven years later the author added an addition. Satton tried to find an original article with a mistake, but he failed - the indicated works had his own logic of obtaining this number. The only thing he was lucky to find was a few publications 1934 in American magazines, which stated that 100 g of spinach contains 53 mg of iron - almost 20 times more than in fact. However, the decimal commercial (in the USA - point) in this case had nothing to do with it. The mistake was quickly found, corrected, and it had no consequences. In any case, none of the claims that there was a lot of iron in the spinach, he did not refer to this article.
Further, Satton was already engaged in the history of "Error about the error." As it turned out, the British expert on nutrition and toxicology of food products Arnold Bender (1972) and professor of immunohempton at Southampton Terents Hamblin (1981) incorrectly informed people about the “commas mistake”.
Then Satton went on a different trace. In pre -war America, the sailor Plav was very popular - the hero of comics and cartoons, who ate a huge amount of spinach. The creator hit, the artist Elsi Segar I chose spinach to popularize a healthy diet among children. As a result, the consumption of this product in the United States increased markedly, and the agronomists in gratitude erected the monuments in several states.
However, in none of the many comics and cartoons, Satton did not find direct hints that the extraordinary strength of the character is associated precisely with iron in spinach - only some visual metaphors. In some places, turn directly explains that he eats spinach, because it has vitamin A (useful, rather for vision). In addition, prick first appeared with spinach in 1932, two years before the publication of the 1934 article with erroneous data.
And yet, a plausible hypothesis of the appearance of an error can be put forward here, as some do Researchers. In particular, c table, which was given by one of the founders of agricultural chemistry, Jean-Batist Busingo in 1872, in the column “Spinach leaves” is listed 0.0045 g, that is, 4.5 mg of iron per 100 g of the product. For this work in 1897 in his article Emil Hausermann referred to, but he already gives a range of 32.7–39.1 mg:
The fact is that Hausermann leads the content of iron in 100 g of dry matter, and not in fresh leaves. He calculated the upper value from the article by Busingo, the lower - took from Articles Gustava von Bunga (1892). It can be assumed that the average value of 35.9 mg, related to a dehydrated spinach, was perceived by someone as the content of iron in fresh spinach.
As for examples of less radical deviations of centuries -old data from today's indicators (1.5–1.7 times), then, as modern calculations, scientists of the line of the 19th - 20th centuries simply did not take into account oxygen - classic tables contained data on the share of iron oxide in spinach, and not at all pure iron. Such an error could have been enough for someone to incorrectly declare spinach the “Iron Champion”.
As you can see, in our case, we encountered two myths at once: about the content of iron in spinach and about the history of the appearance of this error.
Not true
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