green'snutrient-composition
If you boil some greens and drink the liquid only, will that give you a lot of carbohydrate energy or none to little i.e. do you actually need to eat the solid or how much energy can you get from the liquid alone?
If it comes from the solid, is most of the carbohydrate it in the stalk or leaf?
Thanks
When the greens are cooked, the cells will rupture and more easily take on outside fluids (and salt), so salting them while cooking will get the salt into the greens. You could also brine or rub the leaves with salt, this is frequently done with cabbage before pickling. The effectiveness of this method will vary depending on the greens though, some leaves like kale have a more waterproof layer over the outside of the leaf, so just rubbing them with salt may not work. I have seen people "massage" the leaves with salt to tenderize them and break down some of the fibers, or blanch them in salted water.
To put it simply, it's lost exceedingly rapidly. Can we scientifically measure the exact amount of the reduced form of vitamin C in produce over time? Yes, we can. Have there been studies and papers published that have done this? Yes, there have been. Are these results relevant? Yes and no.
These results allow us to draw certain conclusions about the loss* of vitamin C after produce has been harvested. We know that plant cells are constantly biosynthesising vitamin C (through a chain of biochemical reactions involving glucose) and at the same time using it in oxidative processes. By harvesting crops we're taking away a part of this natural oxidative loop and plant cells begin oxidative changes leading up to oxidative stress. The results of these studies confirm the theoretical knowledge we posses about oxidative cell cycles but there is no deterministic way we can deduce or even estimate with high precision the exact percentage of vitamin C that gets used up in the processes we observed. The loss rate is too specific to individual crops and the conditions in which it was harvested and since preserved. You could try to extrapolate the results of such studies (as the one linked below) to the produce you keep in your fridge but you would most assuredly get highly varying results.
*Please note that vitamin C is not lost, it is just transformed into a different form (oxidative form) during the oxidative processes that take place inside plant cells.
What we know for sure is that by reducing the temperature we slow down the oxidative processes that change the plant cell's biostructure, molecules and function. We can take cold inhibition to an extreme by deep freezing produce which virtually stops these deteriorating processes.
This answer has already run a bit longer than I originally planned but I thought giving you some background to the biochemical processes that take place might be useful. Lastly I'd like to give you a practical example of exactly how vitamin C oxidation (even visually) deteriorates produce.
Half an apple, where the left side has been artificially treated with vitamin C:
Relevant links: (1)
Best Answer
According to Nutrition Data, using spinach as a sample green leafy vegetable, a 30 gram serving of spinach contains only about 1 gram of carbohydrates, and that is dietary fiber.
So the simple answer is that there isn't much energy there at all, in the leaf or stem, or to be leached into the cooking liquid.