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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

Eating more veggies, especially leafy greens, is a great way to improve your health across the board. But don’t go too crazy with raw spinach. The high oxalate content can cause problems for some people:

https://www.jillcarnahan.com/2017/11/06/oxalates-101-oxalate...

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Frozen spinach is a convenient source of pre-cooked spinach.

I also like to cook it from freeze-dried (which I buy from northbaytrading).

Is there an advantage to freeze-dried compared to frozen or raw (other than, I'm guessing, shelf life)? Is there a loss of nutritional content?

Cooking spinach degrades the antioxidant lutein.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181221123810.h...

Looking at the figures in the paper, cooking for 4 minutes (which is way overkill for spinach leaves) decreases lutein by 25-50% (with relatively large error bars).

I haven’t done the math in how much lutein is in spinach vs how much we need but to a first order of approximation that’s acceptable.

In the abstract they say they cooked spinach for up to something absurd like 60 minutes. Spinach leaves are cooked within a minute or so in my experience, so not sure why they performed the study that way.

Cooking spinach for an hour is something that I suppose might happen if you're making a puréed soup with spinach, and you don't think to put the spinach in at only the last minute.

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