By Michelle Fabio

Add another reason to eat tomatoes on your list.

A Finland research study has found that LDL (“bad”) cholesterol levels dropped by nearly 13 percent in 21 healthy volunteers after tomato products were added to their daily diet for three weeks.

Subjects in the study consumed 30 mg of tomato ketchup and 400 ml of tomato juice a day; at the end of the three weeks, total cholesterol levels dropped by 5.9 percent while the LDL levels specifically were reduced by 12.9 percent.
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By Michelle Fabio

A study conducted by teams at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and Ohio State University in Columbus used rats to test whether lycopene supplements could provide the same health benefits as tomatoes themselves—and the resounding answer was no.

In the study, 194 male rats were given a chemical that induces prostate cancer. Some rats were given whole tomato powder, some pure lycopene, and the others no supplements
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By Michelle Fabio

A recent study at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom suggests that male fertility may be enhanced by a bowl of tomato soup a day—this because of the increased levels of lycopene, a powerful antioxidant that gives tomatoes its red color, in the subjects’ semen.

Researchers had six healthy male volunteers with an average age of 42 eat a can of Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup every day for two weeks. The results, published in the British Journal of Urology, found that lycopene levels in semen increased by between seven and 12 percent in the men.
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By Michelle Fabio

Recent reports by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have warned that some outbreaks of salmonella infections over the past fifteen years have been linked to raw tomatoes.

While the overall odds are low that you would contract salmonella infections from raw tomatoes, the CDC estimates that there may have been up to 79,000 such illnesses from twelve multi-state outbreaks since 1990.
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By Michelle Fabio

Scientists have come up with a way to infuse a full day’s worth of folate, a vitamin essential for healthy growth during early pregnancy, into a single tomato serving.

The tomato was developed at the University of Florida at Gainesville by Andrew Hanson and Jesse Gregory. “This could potentially be beneficial worldwide,” said Hanson. “Now that we’ve shown it works in tomatoes, we can work on applying it to cereals and crops for less developed countries where folate deficiencies are a very serious problem.”

In children, folate deficiencies have been linked to birth defects, slow growth rates and developmental problems, while in adults, low folate levels have been associated with anemia.
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By Michelle Fabio

In a study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, researchers at Ohio State University found that orange “Tangerine” tomatoes contain lycopene that is more easily absorbed into the body than red tomatoes.

Why should we care?

Lycopene is a powerful nutritional antioxidant that reduces the amount of damage done to body cells by oxygen that could lead to cancers and heart disease.

Although red tomatoes have lycopene in higher concentrations, individuals in the study that were given spaghetti meals made with orange tomatoes absorbed up to two and a half times more lycopene into their bodies than those who had the red tomato pasta sauce.
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