For flavor, it is really hard to beat a ripe, warm summer or fall tomato fresh off the plant.
Ask most people and they will tell you tomatoes are vegetables. Tomatoes are actually fruits, however, and are also technically berries. Which reminds me of a quote I heard a while back: “knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not adding tomato to fruit salad.” I just wish I could remember who said it.
Some varieties of tomato, like these tiny grape tomatoes, are almost always eaten raw on salads but are also delicious lightly cooked in a pasta primavera.
Aside from fruit salad, eat as much tomato as you can, every day, raw or cooked. Tomatoes are that good for your health. They are full of phytonutrients including carotenoids, glycosides, flavanols, flavanones and hydroxycinnamic acids. Tomatoes supply vitamins C, B1, B6, B3, A, E, K and folate. There are plenty of the minerals potassium, iron, manganese, magnesium, phosphorous, molybdenum and cooper. Tomatoes have fiber, choline, tryptophan and a little protein. All of these nutrients in combination give tomatoes very strong antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties which supports cardiovascular and bone health.
Whether orange, red, purple, green, yellow or white, all tomatoes are packed with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory compounds.
There are several ways to maximize the health benefits of eating tomatoes. Pick or buy the ripest tomatoes you can find as the amounts of some of the phytonutrients continue to increase with increasing ripeness. The greatest concentrations of many beneficial compounds is in the skin, so always eat the whole tomato. A small amount of your favorite fat with a tomato helps to increase the availability of the many fat-soluble nutrients to our bodies.
Tomatoes are known to help fight some cancers, as is broccoli. Eating these two foods together produces a really super anticancer effect that is much larger than eating either one alone. This is the synergy of whole foods in action and finally being proven by modern science, even if we still don’t understand why.
Roma tomatoes are less juicy and firmer than most and are usually cooked for sauce.
Some compounds in tomatoes are made more easily available for our bodies to use if the tomatoes are cooked. This is true for lycopine(because it has been tested) but might also be true for other as yet untested compounds. Longer cooking times, such as for ketchup, tomato sauce and tomato paste also concentrate nutrients.
Try to avoid canned tomato products. Because they are acidic, tomatoes have a greater ability than other vegetables to pull BPA from the plastic lining of cans. If you like ready to use tomato sauce, please buy glass jars instead of cans to avoid this hormone disruptor.
Yellow pear tomatoes are sweet tasting little jewels.
Tomatoes are native to Central America and were cultivated since before the Aztecs. The Spanish explorers of the new world took tomatoes home to Europe. From there they have conquered nearly every cuisine of the world in less than 500 years.
Cherry tomatoes maturing in the backyard garden.
The tomato is a member of the nightshade family of plants. People sensitive to the alkaloids present in nightshades should avoid eating them. Most will have no problems with this delicious and healthy whole food as the alkaloid level in the fruit is very low. Just be sure not to eat the leaves which have much higher levels of the offending compounds.
“Sweet 100” tomatoes are a mid-sized hybrid about the size of a fifty cent piece.
There are hundreds of varieties, or cultivars, of tomatoes available today. They range from very small to fruits of more than a pound each. There are tomatoes in every color of the rainbow plus stripes. Some varieties are specialized for specific climactic conditions. Tomatoes are one of the most popular items in any produce display.