Who would like to eat only lettuce for a month? Don’t all shout at once!
Since 1992 May is designated “Lettuce Month” (https://lnkd.in/dzME9Vdf), instituted by the “@The Association for Dressings and Sauces”, in my opinion an ironic salute to the tastelessness of the leaves.
Lettuce (Lactuca sativa, ) was cultivated in ancient Egypt for both leaves and seed oil. The Romans called the plant “lactuca” for its milky sap. In Jewish tradition, lettuce often serves as the “bitter herb” eaten at the Passover meal.
As a food, lettuce is eaten at the young“rosette”. Later in the season the plants grow tall flowering stems that are too bitter to eat. A nutritional lightweight, with little carbohydrate, proteinor fat, lettuce nevertheless provides significant amounts of Vitamin K; greenervarieties also provide Vitamin A and minerals.
Lettuce phytochemicals are dominated by caffeicand chlorogenic acids, important antioxidants. Some varieties are rich inflavonols (e.g. quercitin, kaempherol) and flavonol glycosides. Red lettucegets its colour from anthocyanins.
Lettuce is long recognised as a medicinal plant.“It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is 'soporific' (Beatrix Potter, The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies); in support, Kim et al (2017) propose lettuce extract for treating insomnia, attributing soporific bioactivity to bittertasting sesquiterpene lactones lactucin and lactucopicrin.
Lettuce bioactives arealso suggested for treating itch associated withkidney-disease (Sepehri et al, 2022). Lettuce extract appears in numerousskincare products, with many claims resting on its antioxidants. But salad-makersbe warned, lettuce can occasionally cause contact dermatitis (Pothula et al,2020).
Enjoy your lettuce AND ITS ACCOMPANIMENTS.
Further reading
🥬 Wikipedia(2024) “Lettuce”, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lettuce & oldid=1220664321
🥬Kim HD et al (2017). Sleep-inducing effect of lettuce (Lactuca sativa) varieties on pentobarbital-induced sleep. Foods cience and biotechnology, 26(3), 807–814. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10068-017-0107-1
🥬Sepehri NZ et al (2022). Lettuce as an Effective Remedy in Uremic Pruritus: Review of the Literature Supplemented by an In Silico Study. Evidence-based complementary and alternativemedicine : eCAM, 2022, 4231854. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/4231854
🥬 Shi M et al(2022). Phytochemicals, Nutrition, Metabolism, Bioavailability, and Health Benefits in Lettuce-A Comprehensive Review. Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland), 11(6), 1158. https://doi.org/10.3390/antiox11061158
🥬 Pothula S, Sanchez AP, Katta R. (2020) Lettuce allergy and hand eczema. Consultant. 60(9):29-30.http://doi.org/10.25270/con.2020.06.00024
