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  1. If you boil some greens and drink the liquid only, will that give you a lot of carbohydrate energy or none to little i.e. do you actually need to eat the solid or how much energy can you get from the liquid alone?

  2. If it comes from the solid, is most of the carbohydrate it in the stalk or leaf?

Thanks

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According to Nutrition Data, using spinach as a sample green leafy vegetable, a 30 gram serving of spinach contains only about 1 gram of carbohydrates, and that is dietary fiber.

So the simple answer is that there isn't much energy there at all, in the leaf or stem, or to be leached into the cooking liquid.

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Most plant carbohydrates come from sugars, which are water soluble. Intuition tells me that if you boil the plant long enough, some of the sugars will leech into the water and you'll be able to drink it. As @SAJ14SAJ mentioned, green leafy things are usually pretty devoid of carbs, so you won't get much.

Also, as always, you'll get much more of the nutrients from a food by eating it, than juicing it or drinking the leftover liquids

The onion is one of the more "carby" vegetables that I know of, and according to this website:

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2501/2

about half of the carbs are from sugar

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  • All carbohydrates "come from sugars"; they are assembled from chains of sugar molecules. That doesn't mean that plants retain or store them in sugar form in significant quantities. Green leafy vegetables do not contain much free sugar; those carbohydrates they do contain are primarily in the form of dietary fiber.
    – SAJ14SAJ
    Nov 22, 2013 at 15:05

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