Spinach is not good for iron, and how do we know?

When we were kids, we were taught in school that spinach was the best source of iron. The. Best. Always listed as number 1. The recommended food for anaemics. We were not the only kids who swallowed this information (and spinach, thereafter). Millions of people dutifully chugged it, with, alas, not much benefit.

In 1981, I read this stunning article in, I don't remember exactly, but probably the long defunct and beloved Science Today, or possibly  Scientific American which I used to browse in the college library, or even Nature (unlikely in the extreme, though the college did subscribe), which basically pointed out that the whole thing was a myth. Wha--??

Spinach, the article said, was much prescribed, but didn't help. Researchers tried to explain the failure away as iron being poorly absorbed from spinach, and much research effort was squandered on finding the guilty chemical, with oxalic acid being charged with being the villain (it still hasn't lost villain status).

As I recall from the article, researchers who subsequently re-measured the value persistently found figures not exceeding 13% of the reported textbook value, but they all used different methods than the original study. Then, one persistent researcher duplicated the equipment itself, and found a value of 11% of the reported 35 mg/100 g.

Digging backwards, they finally found the original handwritten notes and discovered that while transcribing to typed format, the decimal point had been put one space to the right.

I vaguely remember this as being a huge nutritional study, commissioned by an Army (the British Army?), and then being published as textbooks thereafter. And certainly, it was published in our textbooks in school!

This discovery was then published as a correction, way late in the early 1980s.

There was also a lot of detail on Popeye and how the cartoon was created to boost spinach consumption to reduce anaemia in the USA population.

The article ended with: The only reason for you to eat spinach is if you like the taste.

Now, this was fascinating, shocking, and completely put me off from eating spinach, unless it came in the form of palak paneer.

And there it stayed till I mentioned this on the internet sometime in the late 00's or early 10's. Someone (rather snootily) commented to me that the decimal place story was a myth and had been busted. Now, unfortunately, I had no copy of the article. To this day, I cannot find the article.

However, thanks to the Internet and Google, you can find all sorts of hints around the issue. Chatting with some classmates at a party a couple of months ago got me talking on it, and one of them duly googled and sent me a link. Today, I decided to hunt out the article, if at all possible (failed).

Much of what you find today on the Net is that the decimal place was, indeed, a myth. (If I find that original article, I shall be sure to scan it and post a copy here. I am dead sure I read about the percentage values that led to the need to dig backwards.)

But... could it be supersistence of my own memory? Could my subconscious have embellished the story? Was it, after all, only the original article, Fake!, that I read? I somehow doubt my college library subscribed to BMJ, as we were not a medical college. So... where? Anyone has old copies of Science Today?

Until then:

• Spinach is way low in iron. Check this page and keep reading till you find it tucked away in the low category, just before the conclusions paragraphs. https://www.webmd.com/diet/iron-rich-foods#1 Yup. Only if you like the taste.
• TJ Hamblin published an article, Fake!, in the British Medical Journal, which 'stamped' the decimal story with official approval. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1507475/pdf/bmjcred00690-0047.pdf
• Dr Mike Sutton published an article in HealthWatch Newsletter, showing how he found that Prof Hamblin hadn't had any solid reference to his story, but spinach is, nevertheless, useless as a source of iron. http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/30230/1/7987_Sutton.pdf
• There is an article by Dysology aka Patrick Matthew, debunking the debunker Arnold E Bender, who, along with Prof Hamblin, was probably one of the great popularisers of the story. This also has a timeline on the spinach story. https://super-myths.blogspot.com/2010/12/spinach-iron-decimal-point-error-myth.html
• You can also clutch your hair at academic obfuscations and Chinese whisper by reading this highly readable article by Ole Bjørn Rekdal: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306312714535679

All in all, it seems that the myth busters made a new myth, which, too, has been busted.

But I still love the story of the decimal place. At the very least, it shows the value of both proof-readers and fact checkers.

The thralls of qwerty

I was going to call this post 'The tyranny of qwerty', but it's the other way round. Qwerty does not demand our obeisance, we abase ourselves voluntarily. It's called the network effect.

A bit of history here. The mechanical typewriter was invented many decades ago in early 1873. The early typewriter's main problem was that experienced typists would type too fast, and the keys would get jammed, resulting in delay and, often, damage, the keys being relatively delicate. So, the design of the keys was changed, and instead of an intuitive alphabetical order, the keys were now placed so that adjacent keys were less likely to be hit one after the other, and so reduce the chance of expensive jamming and warranty repairs.

While wikipedia says on the qwerty page that the idea was not to slow typists down, but to prevent key jamming, it becomes clear enough that the way to prevent key jamming was to, er, slow them down. Witness:

There are three rows on which letters occur. The finger with the second least force, the left middle finger (yes, I know there are lefties in the world, but bear with me for a bit), gets the most popular letter in English: E. That, too, not on the home row, but you have to move your hand to the upper row. At the time the typewriter was invented, Y and N didn't have the extra boost that computer input devices demand of us today, and the letters most common were E T A O I N S H R D L U. So, where are these placed? T is on the left hand, too, not only on the upper row, but one step sideways. A gets the left little finger, next only in puniness to the middle one. O is the reluctant ring finger on the right, and I the middle one, both, again, not on the base row. N is below and offset, and probably the most difficult one to locate for a beginner. S is on the left side, too, with the middle finger. H is offset. R is left and upper row. D gets the left middle finger, and L the right ring finger.

What does the powerful index finger on the right hand get? J. Y (not so popular in those days).

Seriously, I know the intent was to prevent keys from jamming. The method, whatever wikipedia says, was to slow people down. Again from wikipedia:

Alternating hands while typing is a desirable trait in a keyboard design, since while one hand is typing a letter, the other hand can get in position to type the next letter. Thus, a typist may fall into a steady rhythm and type quickly. However, when a string of letters is done with the same hand, the chances of stuttering are increased and a rhythm can be broken, thus decreasing speed and increasing errors and fatigue. In the QWERTY layout many more words can be spelled using only the left hand than the right hand. In fact, thousands of English words can be spelled using only the left hand, while only a couple of hundred words can be typed using only the right hand. In addition, most typing strokes are done with the left hand in the QWERTY layout. This is helpful for left-handed people but to the disadvantage of right-handed people.

OK, lefties?

So why do we still use qwerty, when people can touch-type on keyboards that don't even have moving mechanical parts any more? Why not go for a faster layout? Many have been suggested, with supporters of the Dvorak keyboard being the most vociferous since it was invented, and several others, like the Awerty or Colemak.

As wikipedia says,

There was no particular technological requirement for the QWERTY layout, since at the time there were ways to make a typewriter without the "up-stroke" typebar mechanism that had required it to be devised. Not only were there rival machines with "down-stroke" and "frontstroke" positions that gave a visible printing point, the problem of typebar clashes could be circumvented completely: examples include Thomas Edison's 1872 electric print-wheel device which later became the basis for Teletype machines; Lucien Stephen Crandall's typewriter (the second to come onto the American market) whose type was arranged on a cylindrical sleeve; the Hammond typewriter of 1887 which used a semi-circular "type-shuttle" of hardened rubber (later light metal); and the Blickensderfer typewriter of 1893 which used a type wheel. The early Blickensderfer's "Ideal" keyboard was also non-QWERTY, instead having the sequence "DHIATENSOR" in the home row, these 10 letters being capable of composing 70% of the words in the English language.

The reason we're still thralls of qwerty is network effects. Once a particular layout got popular, people trained to use it. To train to use another layout is more expensive, since (a) fewer training courses are available for it, (b) therefore they are more expensive and difficult to access, (c) there are fewer jobs for these rarer versions. Since there are then fewer people trained on these alternative layouts, purchasers of equipment reason that they should use the popular layout as their pool of potential operators will be larger--and less expensive. And before you know it, the tyranny of qwerty covers the entire Roman language world. Yup, not just the English speaking world. You have lots of company.

If I had only had one of the faster keyboards, my hands would ache less, particularly my poor non-dominant left one. I would type faster than 50 awpm. Pigs would have flown, and horses whistled. I may even have been an astronaut. (OK, not the last one, too unlikely).

In closing, I may also mention that the advent of the typewriter meant a major change in the USA, which percolated out to the rest of the world, and a passing observation.

The first was that women went from 4% of office workers to 75% in just 26 years, as the typewriter was marketed as something 'simple enough even for a woman'. (Gaah, but hey, that's the way they thought then). Offices and businesses hired women for this work, not because they thought that women should work outside the house, or be economically participatory, but because they could be paid half what a man would be paid. The inventor of the qwerty machine, CL Sholes, died happy that he had helped women be better off:

"I do feel that I have done something for the women who have always had to work so hard. This will enable them more easily to earn a living."

But then, this was not only easy for women, but it was easier for them than for men because all women are left-handed, as you know from a previous post.

And the second thing? Well, the typewriter was marketed by Remington, the same company that made rifles and guns. This was a most successful diversification for them. They could now help someone get neatly fired in two alternative ways...

OK, go and practice typing asdfgf ;lkjhj, and don't look at the keyboard. On your mobile phone--which really should have a better input method than this relic of supersistence. In the meantime, I'll go off to sob quietly in a corner.

Lefty ladies

All women are lefties

One would expect marketers of any reasonable savviness to find out what best fits their customers' needs and then target the largest possible set of people with the product so designed. No?

No.

Garment manufacturers believe either that women are mostly lefthanded, or that they get someone else to do their buttons for them.

I've had a so-called designer tell me that women's clothes are supposed to close left-handed. I did take the time to explain to the so-called designer that such designs made sense a couple of hundred years ago in the UK, where ladies' maids stuffed ladies into their clothes. See, if you are part of the right-handed majority, you can more conveniently button up someone else if their clothes close left-handed to them.

But for those of us who are neither left-handed nor have maids to do up our buttons and zips for us, it's a stupid design.

At least the zips are mostly centred these days. Some so-called high-fashion trousers come with the zip on the left with a hook that fastens to the back.

Okay, let me amend my initial statement, so: Garment manufacturers believe either that women are mostly lefthanded, or that they get someone else to do their buttons for them, or they are natural contortionists. Even women who wear XXXL sizes.

Supersistence. Sigh.

Oh well, the lefties among women at least find readymade clothes an easy buy. And the number of retailers who sell clothes suitable for righty women is increasing.

Random list of left-handed and right-handed readymade clothing retailers in India:

Righties: Vibe (they've been steadily sensible, leading to undying loyalty from me), Benetton, Provogue (some), Mango (some), Esprit (some)

Lefties: Bizarre, Bossini (most), Allen Solly