Eating Spinach

(CNN)If you were a kid raised anytime between the 1930s and the 1970s -- or raised by someone who was raised then -- chances are good that you grew up with the idea that spinach was a muscle builder par excellence.

We owe that notion to a comic-strip cartoonist named Elzie Crisler Segar, who created a character that he based on a rough-edged, hard-drinking local from his Illinois hometown. Segar christened the character "Popeye," a sailor who debuted in a strip in 1929.

By 1933, when he began to appear as one of the lead characters in an animated cartoon series called "Thimble Theatre," Popeye was getting instant strength from spinach.
And he needed it, thanks to an assortment of enemies on the high seas and terra firma alike. 

Whenever the diminutive mariner downed a can of spinach, muscles inflated, enabling him to pound the stuffing out of his archnemesis -- a piratical sailor called Bluto -- who was much larger and sturdier, but lacking that secret green rocket fuel.

The legend of Popeye -- and the source of his superpower -- long outlasted the character. But, experts say, answering the question of whether spinach really does make us stronger takes some complicated turns.

The science of spinach
One point that could support the spinach-strength connection is that it contains plenty of nitrates, "which might improve muscle endurance," said Norman Hord, chair of the University of Oklahoma's Department of Nutritional Sciences. These nitrates are rapidly depleted during exercise or physical exertion and replenishing them "increases force production in exercising skeletal muscle."

"More research is being done now to determine if increased nitrate in muscle translates to increase muscle strength and improved athletic performance," Hord added.  TO READ ENTIRE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE...