Why cooked spinach isn't the same as raw spinach

A cup of raw spinach and a cup of cooked spinach are not the same food. They shouldn't share a database row.

Three things change when you cook spinach#

1. Iron availability goes up. Cooking breaks down the oxalates that block iron absorption. The total iron is similar, but more of it ends up in your bloodstream.
2. Vitamin C goes down. Heat is hard on vitamin C. A few minutes in a pan drops it noticeably.
3. Volume collapses. A cup of cooked is roughly five cups of raw. The per-portion numbers change by an order of magnitude.

Apps that treat both as "spinach" and let you scale the grams will produce wildly wrong totals.

What we do instead#

Every food in the OrthoFoodie database is logged with its cooking method as part of the entry. Pan-fried salmon is a different row from oven-baked salmon. Boiled broccoli is a different row from steamed. Raw and cooked spinach are tracked separately.

The trade-off#

Higher precision means more entries. We work with the Dutch (NEVO) and US (USDA) national nutrition databases, which already model cooking method distinctly. We don't crowdsource food values.

If the food you ate isn't in the database, the coach suggests the closest generic and flags it so you know the data is approximate.

Why it matters#

For most days, the precision is overkill. For a week where you're trying to close a specific gap (iron, B12, omega-3) it's the difference between actually closing it and thinking you did.