The latest bio-engineering breakthrough for human heart cell regeneration: spinach leaves?

Yes. You heard correctly. The same stuff Popeye eats, you can also use to basically recreate a human heart and then repair damaged organs. Mind-blowing.

The science is so groundbreaking that at first glance, you’d find it hard to understand: kind of like watching “The Matrix” for the first time, and you’re tilting your head trying to make some sense out of it. The idea, though, is actually quite simple — just hard to get around the fact that you’re basically using actual spinach leaves as a construct for creating an entire vascular system. In essence, a real human heart. Made out of spinach leaves.

Another way of thinking about it is to imagine prosthetics for a moment. A soldier loses an arm, gets a prosthetic limb. It’s ‘grafted’ onto his body as part of his entire system. It works like an arm, but it isn’t made of flesh.

The same can be said for this bio-engineering miracle.

Scientists from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Arkansas State University-Jonesboro have found a way to replicate a human heart  by using spinach leaves, and when you think about it, it’s not that hard to imagine.

The way a spinach leaf is constructed does, in fact, resemble exactly how an aorta in a human heart looks and even operates. Because of the similar construct, those scientists were game in trying something monumental: they perfused through the stem of a spinach leaf and found that the channels found in each leaf were very suitable for pumping blood vessels. Like a human heart.

Like a jigsaw puzzle, they grafted and designed an actual “spinach leaf heart” designed to pump blood throughout the entirety of it, interconnected and fluid, and the bonus was quite simple – it’s self-sustaining.

For years, 3D printing was the norm in recreating large-scale human tissue with just one slight problem – no vascular network to circulate blood, resulting in tissue death. The “spinach heart,” though, solves that problem, sort of like an external battery designed to recharge a dead system. The research and experimentation proved to be an interesting possibility for not only repairing damaged organs, but to even treat heart attack patients.

The spinach heart can help boost an already strained heart, allowing doctors to do the work they need to do to repair a vascular system, basically. Sort of like life support.

We knew spinach was supposed to be good for you already. Now it’s so much more!

Further testing and refinement are obviously still to come for this new methodology, but you can expect great things to come as well. Just another testament on how everything in nature seems to be connected somehow, and there’s always something new to discover right at our fingertips without even messing around with chemicals, antibiotics, or drugs.

Yep. Just use spinach.