Things You Didn’t Know About Plants
Our life would be simply impossible without plants. They contribute to preserving a favorable environment for the human body and serve as an essential resource in nutrition and the production of medicines.
At the same time, many of us do not think that plants have their own lives and are pretty active. From the outside, it seems that they are motionless, but, at this very moment, the most unexpected things can happen to them. For example, plants can communicate through an underground network of fungi: warn one another of dangers, or (as some studies show) even exchange nutrients. Beauty of calathea plant they are such a beauty to look at, and can help with the fungi dangers.
So no matter what you do – you may be growing garden trees, saving a wild forest, or trying to increase crops yield – the better you understand plants, the more influential the results. Here are just a few surprising facts about plants around us.
90% of Foods Come From Just 30 Plants
There are tens of thousands of plants in the world that we can eat, and however, people prefer a diet of only 30 types. Moreover, this limitation is in no way connected with the nutritional value of these plants. On the contrary, by researching plants, we can discover new sources of vitamins and nutrients.
70,000 Plant Species Are Used for Medicine
In contrast to nutrition, medicine is entirely different. We use about 70,000 plant species here, and traditional medicine utilizes most of them; however, many modern drugs are also of herbal origin.
Nearly 80% of the Earth's Original Forests Have Disappeared
Forests that prevailed on Earth about 8000 years ago have completely disappeared today, and humanity has destroyed the overwhelming majority of them, about four-fifths. It is difficult to imagine how many plant species disappeared during this process. Perhaps some of them would be important for our life.
There Are Over 80,000 Species of Edible Plants
As mentioned earlier, people around the world are pretty restricting their plant-based diet. But if you ever want to experiment with your culinary preferences, there is always something exotic. Of course, if you can buy this food in your region.
1% of Rainforests Plants Have Been Studied for Medicinal Potential
Protecting rainforests is essential from an environmental and a humanitarian point of view. To date, we have uncovered only one percent of their potential for medicine, and just imagine how rich a resource it is for the production of drugs.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, even after many years of interaction with the plant world and its active research, we still know quite a bit about it. Through research, we regularly learn a lot about the plants around us. And these discoveries help us to understand them better and use their benefits in the nutritional and medical fields.
Thus, we can once again emphasize how vital environment preservation is for our life. For thousands of years, we have used natural resources to satisfy our needs, not realizing that we caused irreparable harm to ourselves. However, we now have enough knowledge to make this process mutually beneficial for both the plants and us.
