Mary Allen
Spinach is a plant. The leaves are used as a vegetable. Spinach grows all over the world except in the tropics. It originally comes from ancient Iran, and the name also comes from the Persian language. Spinach has been cultivated in Europe since the Middle Ages.
The plant is annual. This means: The plant itself does not survive the winter. But she lets her seeds fall into the ground, which sprouts the next spring. Its stem is smooth and can grow up to a meter high. The leaves grow along the stem. The fruits look like a thorn, they are just as edible as the leaves.
Spinach is cooked as a vegetable, or the leaves are used in a salad or as an ingredient. Spinach tastes slightly bitter. It can be used to turn food green. Don’t keep spinach for too long and then eat it. In the long run, a poison forms in spinach, and nitrite.
Is spinach really that healthy?
Like many other vegetables, spinach is inherently healthy. In the past, it was also used as a medicinal plant. Over a hundred years ago, people began to believe that spinach was particularly healthy: it contained a chemical compound with a lot of iron. Our body needs it. It is ten times as much as other vegetables.
One suspects that a scientist made a mistake. It could be that he made a mistake with a decimal place. Or the scientist examined dried spinach. Dry spinach contains much more of this iron compound proportionally than fresh spinach because fresh spinach still contains a lot of water. For some reason, it was then assumed that fresh spinach also contained as much iron.