If not broccoli, maybe spinach?

A Swedish Lund University based researcher is making spinach safer for young kids. 

  • Popeye the Sailor is a cartoon fictional character created by Elzie Crisler Segar in the 1920s, who gets his supernatural strength from spinach.
  • Dr. Noor Liyana Yusof from Lund University has found a way to help the youngest Swedes make sure they eat their spinach — safely.

  • Spinach is a nutritious vegetable, but is not recommended for infants because of its nitrate content. Noor Liyana's method uses sugar and vacuum to modify the metabolism in the spinach leaves in such a way that the nitrate levels decrease up to 70%.
  • Spinach, one of the most popular greens for healthy diets, isn’t so safe for infants and small children because the levels of nitrates found in the leafy greens are too high for small bodies to process.

  • Dr. Yusof's simple method of "placing the leaves in a sugar solution and then vacuum-treating them forces the sugar molecules to get into the leaves, stimulating their metabolism, so that nitrates are reduced” up to 70 percent, so it remains safe for all to enjoy.