Raw spinach in particular also has high levels of oxalic acid, which can interfere with the absorption of other nutrients, and cause kidney stones when binding with calcium. Processing it by cooking can reduce its concentration and impact significantly without reducing other nutrients in the spinach as much.
Grinding and blending foods is itself processing. I don’t know what impact it has on nutrition, but mechanically speaking, you can imagine digestion proceeding differently depending on how much of it has already been done.
You do need a certain amount of macronutrients each day, and some from fat. You also don’t necessarily want to overindulge on every micronutrient. If we’re putting a number of olives in our salad equivalent to the amount of olive oil we’d otherwise use, we’ll say 100 4g olives, that we’ve lowered the sodium from by some means to keep that reasonable … that’s 72% of recommended daily value of our iron and 32% of our calcium. We just mentioned that spinach + calcium can be a problem; and the pound of spinach itself contains 67% of iron and 45% of our calcium.
… That’s also 460 calories worth of olives. I’m not sure if we’ve balanced our salad optimally here. Admittedly, if I’m throwing this many olives in with this much spinach in the first place, I’m probably going to cook the spinach, throw in some pesto and grains or grain products, and then I’ve just added more olive oil back in again … ;)
And yeah, greens with oil might taste better or be easier to eat than greens just with fatty additions like nuts, seeds, meat, or eggs.
Raw spinach in particular also has high levels of oxalic acid, which can interfere with the absorption of other nutrients, and cause kidney stones when binding with calcium. Processing it by cooking can reduce its concentration and impact significantly without reducing other nutrients in the spinach as much.
Grinding and blending foods is itself processing. I don’t know what impact it has on nutrition, but mechanically speaking, you can imagine digestion proceeding differently depending on how much of it has already been done.
You do need a certain amount of macronutrients each day, and some from fat. You also don’t necessarily want to overindulge on every micronutrient. If we’re putting a number of olives in our salad equivalent to the amount of olive oil we’d otherwise use, we’ll say 100 4g olives, that we’ve lowered the sodium from by some means to keep that reasonable … that’s 72% of recommended daily value of our iron and 32% of our calcium. We just mentioned that spinach + calcium can be a problem; and the pound of spinach itself contains 67% of iron and 45% of our calcium.
… That’s also 460 calories worth of olives. I’m not sure if we’ve balanced our salad optimally here. Admittedly, if I’m throwing this many olives in with this much spinach in the first place, I’m probably going to cook the spinach, throw in some pesto and grains or grain products, and then I’ve just added more olive oil back in again … ;)
And yeah, greens with oil might taste better or be easier to eat than greens just with fatty additions like nuts, seeds, meat, or eggs.