Bitter Hero #2: Mustard Greens
The leaves with a Wimbledon-strength grunt is here is to serve as an ace for your health
Eating leafy greens can be a balloon of high expectations, punctured by reality. They take ages to chew. Don’t taste that overly flash. And you don’t even get that Popeye kick. And that applies to the A-grade foliage, like spinach and kale. The latter already owns the patent for a taste only a fist could love. Can this flora be more challenging? Hell yeah, shouts mustard greens.
When eaten on their own, mustard greens serve up some frontier justice to your misbehaving tastebuds. Bitter. Spicy. Pungent. Personality traits of a Marvel villain, but peel back the layers and you find an anti-hero adept at draping a protective cape across your health. You just have to pick how you craft them into your cuisine choices because not standing up to their challenging taste may leave your longevity a day late and a dollar short.
What are the Mustard Greens Benefits
1. Shave Decades Off Your CPU
Scoffed since the 5th century BCE, even in the digital age mustard greens may help your brain to stop forgetting to include the attachment. A paper found people who ate just 1-2 servings of leafy greens like mustard greens shaved 11 years off their brain’s age. It doesn’t mean they’ll install an Elon Musk intellect to your noggin, but they’ll help you be just be as smart as you always were.
2. Nature’s Band Aid
If you’re partial to stopping bleeding after you nick your thumb cutting carrots, mustard greens will keep the blood in your ventricles. They’re loaded with obscene levels of vitamin K that helps your blood clot and heart in metronomic regularity. A solid payoff that’s cheaper than a transfusion.
3. KO To Cancer
Okay, so mustard greens aren’t a cure all, but they roll with a deadly posse who love to beat up on cancer. Mustard greens are top heavy with phytonutrients that are linked to cancer prevention, says research. These phytonutrients taste bitter, acrid or astringent so are often removed via cultivation, but the bitterer the better they are driving a stake through cancer’s filthy black heart.
4. Give Your Heart a Refractory Charging Period
All that relentless beating, day after day. Your ticker needs a coffee break which mustard greens deliver. A meta-analysis found these can help reduce your chance of getting a chest clutching heart attack by 15%. If you’re a fan of playing charades, stuff some of these peppery leaves into your mouth before your next game in case you get an ill-timed heart attack when it’s your turn.
A little Goes A Long Way
You don’t need to handcuff your poor unsuspecting grill to bowls of these greens. Stick a few leaves in your regular salad, cover with olive oil or slap them on your beef sandwich to perk it up with a little flavour. They also go well in stews or soups where you don’t even need to bother tasting their full-strength flavor. They’re a bad taste, but can make a drab meal feel as if it’s loaded with glitter in a non-microplastic way.