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Tomatoes protect the skin British researchers have found adding cooked tomatoes to the daily diet improved the skin's ability to protect against harmful UV rays, according to a BBC report on Monday. Researchers at the universities of Manchester and Newcastle found adding five tablespoons of tomato paste to the daily diet of 10 volunteers could help ward off skin damage by providing some protection against the effects of UV rays. Damage caused by these rays can lead to premature aging and even skin cancer. In a study, the researchers gave 10 volunteers around 55 grams of standard tomato paste which contains high levels of cooked tomatoes and 10 grams of olive oil daily, with a further 10 participants receiving just the olive oil. After three months, skin samples from the tomato group showed they had 33 percent more protection against sunburn, the equivalent of a very low factor sun cream, and much higher levels of procollagen, a molecule which gives the skin its structure and keeps its firm. The study suggested the antioxidant lycopene, found at its highest concentration when the tomatoes have been cooked, was behind the apparent benefit. "The tomato diet boosted the level of procollagen in the skin significantly. These increasing levels suggest potential reversal of the skin aging process," said Lesley Rhodes, a dermatologist at the University of Manchester. There was a warning however that tomatoes should be viewed as a "helpful addition" rather than an alternative to topical sunscreen. Dr. Cinque's comments: It isn't just the lycopene, but rather all of the carotenoids that act like internal sunscreens. Remember that plants, being stationary, are out in the intense sun all day and every day, and so they create carotenoid pigments to protect themselves, and the benefit gets passed on to us when we eat them. I suspect that lutein, the yellow pigment, is even more protective than lycopene. After all, the body deposits lutein in the very center of the retina where light gets focused. There is so much lutein deposited there, the spot looks yellow, hence, the name macula lutea, which means yellow spot. I presume that lutein is a much more primary and essential carotenoid than lycopene because of its universal role in vision and because lutein is much more widely distributed in Nature. Every green plant contains lutein, in addition to chlorophyll, which means that lutein is widely distributed all over the Earth wherever green plants grow. Of course, lutein is also abundant in yellow fruits and vegetables. But lycopene is much more scarce, and not all red foods contain lycopene. Strawberries, for instance, do not contain significant lycopene. I don't know what makes strawberries red, but it isn't lycopene. (I just looked it up, and it is a red anthocyanin that makes strawberries red.) The richest sources of lycopene in the modern diet are tomatoes, watemelon, and ruby red grapefruit. It's easy to imagine that there have been, throughout human history, millions, and perhaps billions of people, who did not have access to any of those foods. Maybe they had other foods which contained lycopene, but then again, maybe they didn't. So my hunch is that lycopene is a useful plant pigment which the body can utilize when it's available, but if it doesn't have much or any, the body can make use of other more plentiful carotenoids such as lutein and beta carotene without faltering. Again, that's just my hunch. But nevertheless, I certainly think we should take advantage of the high-lycopene foods that are available to us. In the winter, I eat organic pink and red grapefruit that are grown by my good friend Stanley Jacobson down in Mission, Texas. I eat watermelon from about April through October. And I eat tomatoes, both raw and cooked, all year long. E-mail to a friend Previous Article |
