Dietary phytonutrients in common green leafy vegetables and the significant role of processing techniques on spinach: a review

Abstract

Abstract Leafy vegetables comprises of the majority of food intake around the world. A nuanced understanding of their phytonutrients, bioavailability and post-harvest processing will aid in understanding their utility in human health better. Plant foods have a variety of dietary phytonutrients beneficial to us. With a lot of diversity in the variety of these leafy vegetables, it is of utmost importance as consumers to understand their benefits, functional properties, post processing changes that occurs until it reaches us. Some of the most popular green leafy vegetables include spinach, cabbage, lettuce and mustard greens. In this review, we provide a summary of the phytonutrients in such leafy greens with a detailed description of its bioavailability of nutrients, role of bio fortification, changes during harvest and post-harvest processing. As a low calorie food item, green leafy vegetables are ideal candidates to add valuable nutrients into our daily diets, and spinach especially is known to have multiple therapeutic implications in human health. Post-harvest processing may include addition of nutrients, increasing bio availability of important constituents, assessing effect of fertilizers and growth promoting factors on their nutrient content. All of these parameters need to be studied in depth to improve their beneficial effect in human nutrition and diet. Graphical Abstract

Keywords

• Green leafy vegetable
• Phytonutrients
• Bioavailability
• Processing techniques
• Spinach