Human said:
.... I'm trying to eat healthy and figure out how I can get more out of my food without other food(s) interfering with absorbing the nutrients. I don't see a point in making a dish with spinach and cheese
If we looked at every chemical component in every food and every potential reaction between all of those compounds in everything we eat, and only ate what was perfect without toxins or chemical binding or bonding reactions ... we would all starve to death!
Let's take spinach for example. Spinach contains a naturally occuring toxin - oxalic acid. Oxalic acid binds with minerals that are necessary in our diet like zinc, copper, magnesium,
iron and
calcium, making them nearly unabsorbable. And if enough of the oxalate is absorbed, it can find its way to your kidneys where it can combine with calcium to form kidney stones. So, even without the cheese, spinach is itself limiting the amount of iron you can absorb from it. And, the calcium in the cheese may actually be binding with the oxalic acid to keep it from being absorbed - thereby possibly making a "spinach and cheese" dish healthier than spinach alone! As it turns out - spinach is one of those "good news - bad news" foods ... it can be both good for you and bad for you.
Tea leaves, black pepper and parsley contain more oxalic acid than spinach - cocoa, most nuts, most berries and beans contain a little less. Oh, yeah, if you consume too much Vitamin C - your body synthesizes it into calcium oxalate ... back to the kidney stone problem, again.
Tomatoes also contain a lethal (on it's own) toxin - an alkaloid
tomatine, present in very small amounts in ripe tomatoes but in higher conentrations in "green" tomatoes and most concentrated in the leaves
. But, it turns out that tomatine forms an insoluble bond with the cholesterol in our digestive tract - which means the bound tomatine is not absorbed, neither is the cholesterol that it is bound to!!! I wouldn't go chewing on a bunch of green tomato plant leaves ... but treated like bay leaves - you can add a few toward the end of cooking your sauce and then remove them before serving to put back some of the fresh tomato "green" flavors and aromas lost in cooking.
But, like Goodweed noted ... carrots are good for you - too many are bad for you. Every day we hear the cries, no the
SCREAMS, that
ALL sugar is evil ... yet without sugar in our diet (found in vegetable, fruits and meats) we would fold up and collapse like a child's defalted balloon - and die. Salt, another "satanic" ingredient in foods is also
necessary for our survival - without both sodium and potassium salts your heart would quit beating, and the rest of your body's electical system would also quit. Raw honey, which is a good food, can be toxic to children and the elderly - acutally even refined honey is toxic to some people.
Eating a well balanced diet to supply the necessary nutrients is about the best you, or any of us other humans, can hope for.