Ever wonder who came up with spinach as Popeye’s miracle food? Didn’t it seem strange watching the sailorman crank open the can and dump those green leaves into his mouth, shortly followed by a tremendous bulging of his muscles and, of course, his subsequent saving of the day?

I mean, it just kind of reeks of subliminal messaging, parents using cartoons to get their kids to eat their vegetables.

Well, it turns out that those cartoonists were on to something. But instead of the spinach making Popeye’s muscles grow, it was actually making his prostate shrink…not that they could really make that a cartoon-worthy secret superpower, but it works out well for those of us in the real world (with a prostate, that is).

According to researchers at Bar Ilan University in Israel, the antioxidants in spinach slow the growth of cancerous tumor cells. The leading researcher on the project, Dr. Shlomo Bakshi, has said that it can even stop the development of cancer in the tumor.

After spending a good deal of time feeding spinach to mice with prostate cancer, (which I’m sure was an experience in and of its own), the mice showed a 70% reduced rate of death by the cancer.

The bad news is that if you want to be a stickler for prostate cancer prevention, you need to be eating soybean protein, also having been shown to reduce the threat of the cancer.

You may not have a superhero for that one – but you still have Popeye and his spinach. The Bar-Ilan study was published in the ‘FEBS Letters’ (of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies), and is the first research to link spinach and this phenomenon.

Thanks to the Jerusalem Post for bringing this story to our attention – the full story can be found here.

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