From as early as 1935 science journalists were making humorous associations between the comic strip character Popeye, Iron and Spinach. In 1981 consultant hematologist T.J. Hamblin published a paper in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) entitled Fake which made the traditional humorous association between Popeye, Iron and Spinach and claimed (without any references to support the story) that a 19th century data error led to a tenfold exaggeration of the iron content of spinach - which was then perpetuated by generations of other scientists who blindly accepted the Victorian data as accurate.