Scooby has snacks. Garfield has lasagna. And Cartman has cheesy poofs. Yet none rival the relationship Popeye has with spinach. When Popeye eats spinach, his forearms triple, he gains supercharged strength and, perhaps most puzzling of all, he perpetuates one of pop culture's greatest humor12-myths.

Popeye first munched a mouthful of spinach in a July 3, 1932, cartoon strip. Although the sailor man wasn't known for speaking clearly, his actions sure did: Spinach is good, and good for you. Decades later, children are still hearing parents say, "Eat your spinach" -- for its iron content -- "so you can be big and strong like Popeye." ut that's not exactly how the real story went. Popeye actually quipped: "Spinach is full of vitamin 'A' an' tha's what makes hoomans strong an' helty" [source: Cronin]. Turns out, Popeye didn't eat spinach for iron, he gobbled it for vitamin A. (Specifically, he ingested beta-carotene, which his body transformed into vitamin A.)

Popeye's motivation for snacking on spinach isn't the only humor12-myth surrounding this leafy green. Another is that spinach isn't really a good source of iron - people just thought so due to a math error.

The controversy surrounding the amount of iron in this leafy green centers on a report made in 1972 by a nutritionist. Professor Arnold Bender asserted that 19th century German researchers made an error when recording spinach's iron content by placing the decimal point in the wrong position, accidentally multiplying spinach's iron content by 10. The story, which contended spinach had no more iron than other common vegetables, was perpetuated as fact in medical journals, textbooks and popular culture for more than 30 years until it was proven incorrect in a meticulously researched article by criminologist Mike Sutton. Sutton concluded that these German researchers never existed [source: Kruszelnicki, Sutton].