We read the studies. You get the answers.

Magnesium, 400 mg. Iron, 18 mg. Vitamin C, 100 mg. And on the last line of what reads like the back of a multivitamin, piperine, 5 mg, the black pepper extract.

Lowered into boiling water or tipped into a hot pan, a heap of raw spinach starts folding in on itself almost at once. Leaves that were spilling over the rim darken, go limp and settle into a small, dark mound. A bagful goes in; a side dish comes out. You eat spinach for its iron, and mostly raw, because raw feels like the full dose, every leaf whole and nothing given up to the heat. Lately the word going round says cooked spinach is the better source of iron, so now you want to know which of the two gets more of it into you.

The supplement internet has an urgent rule about creatine and water: mix it and drink it fast. It starts degrading the moment it touches liquid — fifteen minutes, some posts say. Pre-mixing a shaker bottle the night before sounds, by this logic, like pouring money down the drain. A food science lab measured what actually happens. Creatine monohydrate in solution at room temperature has a half-life of forty-three days.