Plants contain more than you think

From the air we breathe to the food on our tables or the cotton in our clothes, we use so much from plants. It's always been this way because plants inhabited earth much earlier than us and the animal kingdom evolved to exploit all that plants have to offer.
Each plant we see is like a miniature chemical lab, plants in fact, are able to take up minerals from the soil and carbon from the air and manufacture complex biomolecules like vitamins and store energy in form of sugars. But unlike us, plants cannot move and are forced to live even in very harsh environments. Their adaptive capacity is amazing! In fact anywhere you go on our planet you can find some form of plant life.
Unfortunately the downside of this is that when plants grow in polluted areas or in terrains rich in heavy metals they tend to accumulate these compounds in their tissues.
With the industrialization and the use of fertilizers we have exacerbated the situation. I don't need to tell you about the presence of heavy metals in the air we breathe but you may not know that there is uranium in most commercial fertilizers, we are talking about very low doses but considering that we consume elevated amounts of plants everyday we could accumulate some of these metals over time and expose ourselves to radiation (especially when we smoke cigarettes). I will be writing another post about cigarettes and radiation but there are also other toxic metals that accumulate in tobacco leaves and that are dangerous when inhaled like cesium. If you want to know more about this topic you can check out a book called "trace elements in soils and plants" where they show data about the levels of heavy metals that can be found in plants and also discuss about which plants tend to accumulate more of what element, generally the most dangerous examples are lead and mercury but some common plants like rice has also the tendency to accumulate arsenic. The good news is that we are talking about traces amounts, but it's best to be aware of what we eat, some elements can be accumulated in our bodies and create problems over time.