Tomatoes Great for Heart Health

If you like tomatoes and love tomato ketchup, then there’s good news for you. Finnish researchers have found that eating tomatoes on a regular basis can help fight heart disease by significantly reducing cholesterol levels.

Tomatoes have always been considered healthy food and doctors have been advising patients to eat tomatoes on a regular basis to boost their immunity against several diseases. Several studies have shown that lycopene, the pigment that makes tomatoes red, provides protection against prostate cancer.

Now, the new study by researchers at the University of Oulu in Finland has found that tomatoes are good for the heart as well. For their comparatively smaller study, the researchers used 21 volunteers between the ages of 20 and 49 years, all with normal cholesterol levels.

The researchers first took all volunteers off tomatoes and tomato products for a period of three weeks. Thereafter, they were asked to consume either 30gm of tomato puree or drink 400ml of tomato juice everyday for another period of three weeks.

Regular blood samples of the volunteers were taken at regular intervals during the six week period to keep tabs on their cholesterol levels. The researchers found that volunteers who added small quantities of tomato in their breakfast, lunch and tea, or drank some glasses of tomato juice recorded significant reduction in their “bad” or low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels over the three week period.

Overall, cholesterol levels were found to drop by just under six percent with LDL levels reducing by almost 13 percent. Based on their findings published in the British Journal of Nutrition, the researchers urged patients with high cholesterol levels to start consuming tomatoes or tomato products to reduce their risk of heart attacks and strokes.

“'The changes we saw can be regarded as significant, considering that the time period was only three weeks and all the volunteers had normal cholesterol levels to start with,” the researchers said. Less than five-millimoles of fat per litre of blood are considered to be healthy levels in individuals.

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