Is it true that a food analyst made a mistake while calculating how
much iron spinach had, moving the decimal point to far to the right,
which made it look like spinach had ten times as more then it really
did?

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Clarification of Question by allison90-ga on 26 Oct 2004 11:02 PDT

What did the math problem look like?

The mistake is often attributed to one "Dr. E. von Wolf", who
allegedly determined the nutrition value of spinach in 1870 and whose
slightly misplaced decimal point (or rather: decimal comma, since the
name suggests that Dr. von Wolf was German) was not discovered and
corrected before 1937 when the figures, so far unquestioned, were
reinvestigated.

However, this may be just a legend since this Dr. E. von Wolf is a
very obscure figure whose existence is doubtful.

Scriptor

This might be of interest:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=335945

An interesting tidbit related to Dr E. von Wolf:

We have all taken it for granted that Spinach contains a lot of iron. 
But it seems that this may not be true. According to "BESLIM" Magazine, 
a typo was made by the assistant to an American nutritionist writing 
about spinach who typed in that spinach had 34 mg of iron per 100 g when 
the correct figure was supposed to be 3.4 mg per 100 g! Unfortunately, 
this typo was not caught and the 34 mg figure was published in numerous 
magazines and newspapers. It is said that this erroneous figure even 
helped to give birth to Popeye, the sailor getting strong from eating 
his spinach! 


source: BeSlim Magazine, July/Aug 1998 

[From: http://www.cin.org/archives/cinhealth/199807/0063.html]