A popular although perhaps low calorie food is lettuce – this food is normally eaten raw such as in a salad or also in other functions, such as even replacing bread to make a “lettuce sandwich”. Looking at the nutritional value of lettuce, we can note that it provides vitamin A, as well as folic acid and also Lactucarium. In fact, this is known as Lettuce Opium and is said to be a mild opiate type of substance that is present for all types of this vegetable. In actuality, it is said that Romans and Egyptians used this property of the food to eat at the finish of a meal in order to bring on sleep.
If one looks in more details at the nutritional value of lettuce, we can see that for a portion of 100g or 3.5 oz of this food, that it would provide 55 kJ. Moreover, it would provide 2.2 g of carbohydrates, as well as 1.1g of dietary fibre, 0.2 g of fat, 1.4 g of protein and also 96 g of water. As to the approximate percentage RDAs that this food would provide, we can see that Vitamn A is 21%, B9 18%, C 5%, K 97%, iron 5% and potassium 5%. Thus, we can see that by itself lettuce has little fuel for energetic activities, however, it can provide some useful nutrients such as for vitamin K etc..
(reference:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettuce)
