[Comparative study of minerals and some nutrients in organic celery and traditional celery]

Conventional cultivation pattern, integrated cultivation pattern and organic cultivation pattern are three patterns in China, and organic produce from organic cultivation pattern is considered the best one in quality and safety. Some experiments have been done on the effect of different cultivation patterns on the vegetable quality, such as the contents of Vc, total sugar, and dissoluble solid, which show the organic cultivation pattern and integrated cultivation pattern excel the conventional cultivation pattern, but there are no data that show the difference in the contents of mineral elements. In the present study, the contents of nutritional elements such as Ca, Mg, K, Zn, Fe and Mn and heavy elements such as Cu, Cd and Pb in organic celery and traditional celery were analyzed by ICP-OES, and the contents of some nutritional ingradients such as water, total soluble solid, soluble sugar and asorbic acid were also investigated. The results showed that the contents of K and Zn in organic celery were respectively 70.22% and 47.93% higher than that in traditional celery, but there was no significant difference in the contents of Ca, Mg and Fe, while the content of Mn was 47.24% lower in organic celery (alpha = 0.05). The contents of Cu, Cd and Pb showed no significant difference between the two kinds of celery, and are lower than the national requirement. The content of water and total soluble solid showed no significant difference, whereas the contents of soluble sugar and asorbic acid in organic celery were 55.04% and 118.18% higher, respectively. The difference in the nutritional ingredients and mineral elements and safety status between the two kinds of celery provides academic data for the comparison between organic vegetables and traditional ones.