Non-cultivated Plant Foods in West Africa: Nutritional Analysis of the Leaves of Three Indigenous Leafy Vegetables in Ghana

Although non-cultivated indigenous leafy vegetables (ILVs) are widely consumed in Ghana and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, particularly during periods of food scarcity, much remains to be learned about their content of essential nutrients. We collected the leaves of Cleome gynandra, Fleurya aestuans and Solanum nigrum growing near Kumasi and compared them in terms of their content of essential amino acids, fatty acids, and minerals and trace elements. All three plant foods contained (on a dry-weight basis) 21.6-26% protein whose essential amino acid pattern, except for the methionine/cysteine pair, compared favorably with a World Health Organization standard protein. Although fatty acids accounted for only 0.5-1.1% of the dry weight of the ILVs, the proportion of the essential omega-3 fatty acid �-linolenic acid was high (24.3-58.2%) in all three plants, and the omega-6/omega-3 ratio was a healthful 0.1 and 0. 4, respectively for C. gynandra and S. nigrum, respectively. The leaves of the three ILVs contained nutritionally significant amounts of calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum and zinc, but were devoid of detectable selenium. These results indicate that C. gynandra, F. aestuans and S. nigrum, which are widely regarded by the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa as ‘famine foods’, actually represent excellent potential sources of many different nutrients that are essential in humans.