Marinescu et al. 2020 - Romanian herbs and spices metals

Marinescu et al. measured arsenic, cadmium, copper, iron, mercury, and lead in 42 Romanian medicinal-plant and culinary herb/spice samples. The spice subset covers dill, marjoram, oregano, peppermint, parsley, and thyme, with packaged samples and spontaneous-flora samples. The source is routeable occurrence evidence for herbs/spices and herbal-tea matrices, but packaged and wild-growing samples should not be silently pooled because the authors observed higher cadmium in spontaneous-flora spice samples.

Key numbers

Tables III and IV report mean +/- standard deviation in mg/kg. Selected spice values from Table IV:

Across the spice subset, the authors summarize arsenic as less than 0.01-0.78 mg/kg and cadmium as 0.02-0.12 mg/kg. Mercury exceeded the European Pharmacopoeia 0.1 mg/kg comparator in oregano OV1 (0.374 mg/kg) and thyme TV1 (0.131 mg/kg). Lead exceeded the EU 0.3 mg/kg comparator in some samples, including wild-growing marjoram (0.95 mg/kg) and wild-growing peppermint (1.28 mg/kg).

Methods (brief)

The authors analyzed 42 samples from six medicinal plant species and six spice species commonly used in Romania. Heavy metals were measured after wet digestion with 65% nitric acid and 30% hydrogen peroxide. Arsenic, cadmium, and lead were measured by graphite-furnace atomic absorption spectrometry; copper and iron by flame atomic absorption spectrometry; and mercury by cold-vapour atomic absorption spectrometry. Four determinations were performed for each sample.

Implications

Certification: The spice subset provides occurrence evidence for total arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and lead in Romanian culinary herbs/spices, with important separation between packaged and spontaneous-flora samples.

Courses: The source is useful for teaching that medicinal-plant and culinary-herb markets overlap; route herbal-tea and spice implications separately.

App: Broad herbs-and-spices routing is appropriate for most species. Parsley can route to the existing parsley ingredient page.

Microbiome (if applicable): The paper does not study microbiome outcomes.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• spices
• herbal-botanical-infusions
• herbs-and-spices
• parsley
• arsenic
• cadmium
• mercury
• lead
• copper
• iron

Verification notes

The PDF title, byline, DOI, year, journal, sample descriptions, methods, and Tables III-IV values were read from the auto-fetched PDF. The paper reports element names without arsenic or mercury speciation, so arsenic and mercury are treated as total-element occurrence evidence. Packaged and wild-growing samples are source-distinct and should not be pooled without a logged basis decision. Matrix note: spices is a controlled matrix-map label; medicinal-plants and herbal-teas are source-scope descriptors retained to separate the medicinal-plant/herbal-tea portion of the source from the culinary-spice subset.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.