Fake.
1981; BMJ; Volume: 283; Issue: 6307 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1136/bmj.283.6307.1671
ISSN0959-8138
Autores Tópico(s)Misinformation and Its Impacts
ResumoThe Latest Decalogue In the year that Popeye became once again a major movie star it is salutary to recall that his claims for spinach are spurious.Popeye's superhuman strength for deeds of derring-do comes from consuming a can of the stuff.The discovery that spinach was as valuable a source of iron as red meat was made in the 1890s, and it proved a useful propaganda weapon for the meatless days of the second world war.A statue of Popeye in Crystal City, Texas, commemorates the fact that single-handedly he raised the consumption of spinach by 33 7,.America was "strong to finish 'cos they ate their spinach" and duly defeated the Hun.Unfortunately, the propaganda was fraudulent; German chemists reinvestigating the iron content of spinach had shown in the 1930s that the original workers had put the decimal point in the wrong place and made a tenfold overestimate of its value.Spinach is no better for you than cabbage, Brussels sprouts, or broccoli.For a source of iron Popeye would have been better off chewing the cans (fig 1).Frauds, hoaxes, fakes, and widely popularised mistakes run through the warp and woof of the history of science and medicine.FIG 1-Popeye .. would have done better to eat the cans. National prideSometimes they become a matter of national pride.In 1903 Rene Blondlot, a distinguished French physicist at the University of Nancy, discovered N-rays, a new type of radiation.The rays were originally detected in the emissions of an electrical discharge tube but later were found to issue from a type of home gas light known as a Welsbach mantle and also from heated pieces of silver or iron, from the Nernst glower, and, more surprisingly, from the human body.They could be bent by an aluminium prism and were immediately put to use by Augustin Charpentier, the professor of medical physics at Nancy, to out-
Referência(s)