Tomato Health Benefits: get healthy eating more tomatoes

June 23, 2009

Diets & Nutrition

Vegetables are full of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants and have few calories. They don’t make you fat. From this standpoint tomatoes are super healthy and good. I recommend you eat more.

Tomatoes are a delicacy, especially those that have a rich taste. Tomatoes aren’t really vegetables they are fruits. But we usually combine and treat them as being vegetables. Tomatoes are full of vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin K, vitamin E, vitamin B, lycopene(a powerful antioxidant), potassium, chromium, magnesium, iron… A normal tomato has roughly 35 calories and offers your body almost half of its daily needed quantity of vitamin C.

Lycopene is responsible for the bright red color that tomatoes have. Lycopene reduces the risk of breast, prostate, lung, pancreas, intestinal, ovarian and skin cancer. Because of its antitumor effects lycopene is a powerful antioxidant. In the last years many researches have taken place studying the effects and possible usage of lycopene for its medical properties. Lycopene is really effective against free radicals, being a part of the same type of antioxidants like beta carotene.

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The nutrients from the tomatoes become even more concentrated if you cook them. You can make delicious healthy tomato sauces. Adding a little oil makes the beneficial activity of the tomatoes on your body to be even more powerful. If you can use virgin olive oil when you cook tomatoes.

The scientists from the Food Science and Human Nutrition recommends that a man sick with prostate cancer to eat 2 cups and a half of tomatoes and one and a half cup of raw broccoli. Instead of the 2 and a half cups of raw tomatoes they can eat 1 cup of tomato sauce or half a cup of tomato paste.

The lycopene from the tomatoes helps prevent the forming of blood clots which can lead to a heart attacks. Eating frequently tomatoes prevents the appearance of cardiovascular problems. Being rich in potassium helps lower the blood pressure. Because they contain niacin or vitamin B3 they also have the capability of lowering your cholesterol level.

A study made by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that in the case of people suffering of colon cancer they have 35% less lycopene than healthy people.

Tomato juice is considered a good anti-inflammatory if you drink one glass of juice per day. For diabetics tomatoes are fabulously healthy too. The chromium from the tomatoes maintain your blood sugar under control. Tomatoes are also good in alleviating or curing depression and headaches because they contain vitamin B2.

Basically tomatoes are rally healthy so start eating more.

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