How can different vegetables and fruits have different vitamins and nutrients although they are growed in same soil?
In: Biology
What we think of as nutrients all have functions in the plant as well.
Like ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and citric acid both act as preservatives in fruit, stopping bacteria from eating the fruit until the seeds are ripe. Sugars make fruit more attractive to animals and microorganisms, so they increase once the fruit needs to be broken open to release the seeds.
All the vitamins we get from food also do important jobs in plant cells. The difference is that we can’t make them ourselves. So plants, unless they’ve specifically been bred to accumulate something (like beta-carotene in carrots), just make what they need for their needs and that differs from species to species and probably from individual to individual.
Well vitamins and nutrients are different things. To put it simply, vitamins are more complex chemicals. So plants take nutrients and turn them into vitamins (mostly). Anyways they end up being in different amounts f per plant because different plants require different amounts of them to function. And when humans pick them all those processes it needed the vitamins for grind to a halt and leave the one eating it with all those vitamins and minerals it was storing for itself.
Think of it like the difference between a glass plate and a glass mug. They’re both made of glass, but the way they’ve been processed makes them useful for very different things.
Plants do something similar. They’re using the same soil to grow, but the specific ways they use the nutrients from that soil forms different chemicals in the parts we eat, which in turn makes eating them beneficial in different ways.
They are not grown in the same soil. Well, they could, but they won’t take the same nutrients from the dirt then
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