Leafy Greens: Health Benefits, Varieties, and Why Bitter Is Better

Beyond conventional nutrients, all leafy greens—especially deeply colored ones—are rich in phytonutrients: plant compounds delivering special health benefits.

Leafy Greens Are Power Food

All greens are low in calories. A serving of deeply colored varieties provides your daily supply of vitamins K and A, most of your vitamin C, plus fiber, B vitamins, and essential minerals.

Leafy greens contain more dietary nitrate than other foods. Research shows nitrate helps lower blood pressure, enhance cardiovascular health, and boost athletic performance. But you must eat greens daily to maintain benefits—effects fade rapidly without consistent consumption.

Kinds of Leafy Greens

I often challenge myself to include as many home-grown vegetables as possible in a soup or salad. Leafy greens always top my list: kales, collards, mustards, lettuces, turnips, spinach, arugula, chard, beet greens, chicories, escaroles, and cabbages.

All grow in my gardens and greenhouse. In season, I forage wild greens: dandelions, chickweed, purslane, wild violets, nettles (cooked only!), lamb's quarters, pigweeds, and more. I also count leafy herbs like basil, sage, and oregano—they add depth, flavor, and beneficial phytocompounds.

Variety For Your Salad

My leafies differ in many ways:

• Color: Beyond green shades, colors range from deep purple and fuchsia to red and mahogany, some with red, orange, or yellow veins.
• Shape: round, oval, rhomboid, heart-shaped, ferny, pointy at both ends.
• Topography: curly, deeply frilled, puckered, dimpled, or smooth and flat.
• Texture: soft and tender, buttery, crisp, chewy, juicy.
• Flavor: sweet, bitter, spicy, pungent, tongue-stinging hot.

Three Families of Greens

What we call "greens" fall mainly into three plant families:

• Brassicaceae (formerly Cruciferae, for cross-shaped flowers): kales, collards, arugula, turnip greens, leaf broccoli, cabbages, mustards (including Asian greens like mizuna and any variety ending in "choi/choy/soi").
• Amaranthaceae: spinach, Swiss chard, beets. These contain unique red or yellow/orange pigments called betalains not found in other families.
• Asteraceae (formerly Compositae): lettuce, endive, chicory (frisee, Belgian endive, escarole), and dandelions.

Each family has its own phytonutrient concentrations affecting color and flavor—good reason to eat a wide, changing variety of leafy greens.

Bitter Greens Are Better

Phytocompounds like phenols, flavonoids, isoflavones, terpenes, and glucosinolates give many greens a bitter taste. Plants produce these to deter herbivores. Some are toxic in large doses, so we're hardwired to avoid bitter foods.

Plant scientists have bred bitterness out of cultivated vegetables for consumer acceptance. But research shows bitter phytocompounds deliver broad health effects that help ward off chronic diseases of aging.

Good news: you can teach your palate to welcome, even enjoy, strong bitter flavors of endive, escarole, arugula, chopped kale, and others.

After all, many of us have come to love strong black coffee, tea, and dark chocolate—all rich in bitter phytonutrients linked to health benefits.

~ By Margaret Boyles

About This Blog

Margaret Boyles lives in a wood-heated house in central New Hampshire. She grows vegetables, keeps chickens, swims in a backyard pond in summer, snowshoes in the surrounding woods in winter, and commutes by bike whenever possible.