So here is this amazing amazing stuff that is in fruits and vegetables. It is the red, fat soluble pigment! It is a carotenoid. It is naturally occurring! It is what is responsible for the color change in the fall. I love that color change!
It is an antioxidant! We need lycopene! We do! I can feel my desire for brightly colored foods going up! Think of the amazing color on your plate and know that you are giving your body great stuff! The human body does NOT produce lycopene, we gotta eat it.
You know where the American diet gets 85% of it's lycopene? From ketchup. No really! From cooked tomato products. Remember when Regan administration declared ketchup a vegetable in school lunches? Yes it did!
Lycopene is in tomatoes and watermelon, it is in guava, rosehips, pink grapefruit, apricots, papaya.
It is absorbed and distributed to the liver, the lungs, the prostate, the colon, and skin. It also is great for macular degeneration, and asthma! It is good for high cholesterol, for arthritis, for HIV, all of whom test depleted in the lycopene arena~wow...Pancreatic cancers and prostate cancers as well as cancers of the skin, bladder and cervix all respond WELL to lycopene, and people test low in lycopene when they are positive for these cancers. Now, interestingly enough, these are ALL viral cancers. Hmmmm. Noticing a pattern? I am. It's great for the heart too btw.
This is a really important little nutrient! AND if you cook the tomato product, it has more bioavailability to the body than raw they say. It is absorbed 2.5 times better if you mix it with oil because lycopene is fat soluble. Wow wow.
So I am asking IS it the "cooking" or is it the heat? Tomato paste is higher in lycopene than a raw tomato, by alot! So, is it the cooking? Does it have to be cooked for 3 days on the back burner of an Italian's stove to be the very best? Will dehydrating and sun drying do the same thing? In this case, heating DOES increase the availability of the nutirient in the tomato, that otherwise would NOT be as available to the body.
REACH FOR COLOR! EAT MORE COLOR! America, gets 85% of its lycopene from tomato cooked products because they don't eat enough fresh raw.
So, sundried tomatoes packed in oil...yum! I am wondering if this is good for us and guess what! Ask the question, get the answer. YES! 12x MORE lycopene than fresh raw.
3 comments:
How do sundried tomatoes compare to say, tomato paste or sauce or ketchup?
What I'm looking for is sundried tomatoes have 12x more lycopene than fresh raw tomatoes. What is the ____ X more for paste or sauce than fresh?
tomato paste, sauce and ketchup, and pizza sauces are ALL higher than raw.
What I noticed was that the MORE concentrated the sauce, (ie paste vs sauce) the higher the lycopene, which caused me to search with a different question.
Paste is the highest, as I said. All the cooked tomato is better than raw, but raw is still good.
It's sort of the same with potatoes. They are really better cooked. They break down into a more easily digestible form when cooked. So you steam or boil. then process (like my potato soup) because my body said "ew" to raw potatoes. Now perhaps marinated baby potatoes? I could probably come up with a recipe or two...hmmmm....but in general?
Let's research raw potato recipes and see what is there? I am not missing them though. It's not satisfying to me the way it used to be.
I would say Rebecca, notice what YOUR body tells you, because it is what is charting this course.
Best to you this fine day! :)
S0
here are some numbers for the Lycopene for you...but I wrote this all up just to say EAT THE COLOR!
1 cup of tomato juice: 25 mg
1 cup of spagetti sauce: 56.2 mg
2 TBS tomato paste: 13.8
1 TBS ketchup: 2.7 mg
1 med raw tomato: 3.7 mg
1/2 pink grapefruit: 4.9 mg
1 slice of watermelon: 14.7 mg
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