Assessment of heavy metals content in some medicinal plants and spices commonly used in Romania

Overview

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:

Spice/sample group	tAs	Cd	Cu	Fe	tHg	Pb
Dill, AG1 packaged	0.04	0.02	127	320	ND	0.09
Dill, AG2 packaged	ND	0.04	142	348	ND	0.08
Dill, AG3 wild-growing	0.08	0.12	133	320	ND	ND
Marjoram, OM1 packaged	ND	ND	163	657	ND	0.14
Marjoram, OM2 packaged	0.01	0.05	131	719	ND	0.13
Marjoram, OM3 wild-growing	0.07	0.05	348	473	ND	0.95
Oregano, OV1 packaged	0.03	0.06	201	1375	0.374	ND
Oregano, OV2 packaged	0.21	0.06	198	1460	0.019	0.04
Oregano, OV3 wild-growing	0.33	0.07	222	2471	0.075	ND
Peppermint, MP1 packaged	0.18	0.01	309	6683	ND	0.58
Peppermint, MP2 packaged	0.09	0.05	237	2378	ND	0.18
Peppermint, MP3 wild-growing	ND	0.10	157	673	0.010	1.28
Parsley, PC1 packaged	0.78	ND	133	1360	0.083	0.06
Parsley, PC2 packaged	0.19	0.05	122	336	0.052	ND
Parsley, PC3 wild-growing	ND	0.07	123	748	0.026	0.11
Thyme, TV1 packaged	0.03	0.03	191	1314	0.131	0.07
Thyme, TV2 packaged	0.42	0.07	131	1449	0.036	0.09
Thyme, TV3 wild-growing	ND	0.09	169	2578	0.024	0.11

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

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.

Update history

This page has no substantive edit history yet. Future revisions will be recorded here once the change lands in git.