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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

> The myth that spinach is a good source of iron has its origin in a decimal point error in the 1890s.

I think this persists well into the 2000s.

You might read the rest of the article, which is actually about why people believe statements like the one you quote. In other words, that quote is a trap - the decimal point story itself is an urban legend.

Read the whole paper! Seriously, do it. The author is being cheeky with showing how an academic urban legend gets made and it takes the whole paper to get the punchline.

Sorry, yes - I meant the myth about high iron content of spinach, not the myth about the decimal point error. People may or may not "know" about the decimal point error - that issue is at the heart of this article indeed. But my point is almost an aside about spinach itself.

I'm literally just learning about this being untrue at this very moment. I was actually looking at adding foods that were high in iron to my diet recently and was very confused at what the nutrition data I found for spinach indicated.

Same. I asked my wife and she too thought spinach is high in iron. I was surprised to read that this mistake was discovered 30 years ago. That news sure isn’t getting passed around. We are both highly educated voracious readers and we had no clue.

The link agrees:

> The belief that spinach is a good source of iron, although falsified 30 years ago by Hamblin in a British Medical Journal article, is still widespread among my colleagues, all of whom have, at minimum, a master’s degree in health sciences.

1981 + 30 = 2011.

It doesn't agree. Read the rest of the article.

I think there's two points here. 1) the myth that spinach is a significantly better source of iron than other iron-rich vegatables, and 2) the myth that it came from misreading a decimal point.

I meant #1.

Certainly myth #2 still exists in the 21st century. DDG easily finds recent examples, like https://hekint.org/2022/07/18/spinach-the-great-myth/ .

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