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Lycopene and other nutrients promise boosts to heart health and cancer protection.
Tomatoes are so ubiquitous in the American diet, from the fresh tomatoes just now coming into prime season to countless processed products, that it's hard to believe they were once commonly avoided as poisonous. It's true that tomatoes, like potatoes and peppers, belong to the nightshade family, and their leaves contain alkaloids that can indeed be toxic to pets. Europeans who saw the plants from the New World thought tomatoes resembled belladonna-"deadly nightshade"-and gave the fruit the forbidding name "wolf peach."
Far from being poisonous, tomatoes are now known as one of the most healthy choices in the produce aisle. Though botanically a fruit (technically, a berry), tomatoes are popularly considered a vegetable. Whatever you call them, tomatoes provide more than 10% of your daily value (DV) of vitamin C, vitamin K, copper, potassium and manganese in a single cup, with only 30 calories. They score very low in the glycémie index, measuring how quickly a food boosts blood sugar. One cup of sliced raw tomatoes contains 2.2 grams of fiber-more than some breakfast cereals.
"Tomatoes are also an important source of phytochemicals," says Diane L. McKay, an assistant professor at Tufts' Friedman School, "including the flavonols quercetin and kaempferol, which are found primarily in the skin, as well as the carotenoids beta-carotene and lycopene. It's hard to beat all that nutrient-dense goodness, and tomatoes are tasty, too!"
HEART HEALTHY: Tomato consumption has been associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. "One plausible mechanism for lower cardiovascular risk with tomato consumption is their potassium content," McKay explains. "Tomatoes are among the highest food sources of potassium in the American diet."
Lycopene, an antioxidant carotenoid that gives tomatoes their rich red color and is the most prominent of their...