Tomatoes are such a versatile and healthy fruit!
They’re one of my favorite foods – healthy, delicious and useful in all sorts of dishes. Read on for tomato facts that you might not know, and some ways to eat more tomatoes every day.
Why You Should Eat Tomatoes
1. Tomatoes can help to protect your skin against the sun, and reduce wrinkles
Tomatoes contain an antioxidant called lycopene. This has lots of health benefits, one of which is protecting your skin against damage from the sun. A small study carried out by researchers at the universities of Manchester and Newcastle found that people who ate 55g of standard tomato paste daily had 33% more protection against sunburn. Their skin also showed signs of protection against the aging process – which could prevent wrinkles.
(You can read more about the study on the BBC website.)
2. Cooked tomatoes are even better for you than raw ones
Sometimes, we think that only fresh fruits and veggies count: in fact, the concentration of lycopene is higher in tomatoes that have been cooked. So the tomato paste in your pasta sauce is just as good for you as a raw tomato salad.
3. Tomatoes are full of good things for your body
As well as lycopene, tomatoes are packed with other great nutrients:
- Antioxidant flavonoids, which are thought to help protect against cancer and heart diseases.
- Vitamin C, another antioxidant, which helps to protect cells and assists your body in absorbing iron from food (important if you’re anaemic).
- Vitamin E, which helps protect cell membranes.
Tomatoes are also high in fiber, and low in calories and sugar. One medium sized tomato (10 calories) provides 50% of your Vitamin C requirements for the day.
How to Include Tomatoes Every Day
Tomatoes are so good for you that it’s worth eating some every day. This doesn’t mean endless tomato salads – there are loads of ways to work tomatoes into your meals. How about trying one of these:
- Drinking tomato juice instead of orange juice for breakfast.
- Adding a grilled tomato to your cooked breakfast.
- Having a bowl of tomato soup for lunch (make your own or buy fresh).
- Adding a sliced tomato to your sandwich at lunchtime (cheese and tomato or bacon, lettuce and tomato are popular combinations).
- Making a tomato-based sauce to go with your pasta at dinner time – throw in cooked onion, mushrooms and/or courgette too.
- Using a tin of chopped tomatoes in your chilli, bolognaise or lasagne sauce.
- Adding cherry tomatoes to a garden salad.
Do you have a favourite recipe involving tomatoes? Or is there a particular variety of tomato that you love? Let us know in the comments.
Oh, this is quite an informative article! I think tomatoes are pretty good, and we eat them fairly often. We eat tomato sauce on pasta a lot. And somestime we get cherry tomatoes which are nice and refreshing to just pop in your mouth and eat a few as a snack! They are great in omelets and recently i have taken to eating them raw, like picking up an apple and eating it. I really love Roma tomatoes because they are the perfect size for doing that. After reading this, i really want to eat tomatoes more often in order to prevent from getting cancer and boost my intake of nutrients!
I make a tomato salsa of sorts. Chopped tomato with cilantro/coriander, chilli, a dash of olive oil, salt and pepper. Great on crackers. I could eat a whole tomato like this.
I love tomatoes. Thanks for the great info.
I wish I could like tomatoes because they are in a lot of meals. I only like cherry/grape tomatoes, marinara sauce, and salsa!!
Tomato Puree is a great source of cooked tomato (it goes through a cooking process when it is created) and pretty versatile. For example, you can mix it with apple juice to make a healthier ketchup substitute which you can then also then add to berlotti beans to make healthy baked beans if you eat that sort of thing. Watch out for brands that add salt, however. This is not necessary as the puree already has a naturally salty taste but some manufacturers do it anyway…
I absolutely LOVE tomatoes. Thankfully, during the summer I have access to plenty of “fresh from the home garden” variety which taste amazing. The rest of the year, I end up eating only cooked types. The grocery store variety tastes like cardboard.
If the tomatoes taste like musty water, you probably aren’t eating very good tomatoes. The big, pink tomatoes in the grocery store tend to be pretty plain and “watery”. The tomatoes on the vine are usually more flavorful.
I love tomato beceause of “her” nutrition . My favourite tomato recipe : egg omelete with onion and tomato.
This could be my favourite breakfast.^^
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I think ketchup can not count, because it is a processed food, which contains full of sugar and lacks of nutrients. This was what I read before and I’ve believed. from Japan.
I’m not a huge tomato fan, but I do like it when it’s included in vegetable soups, and sauces.
Fresh cherry tomatoes for snack, insalata caprese, pasta with cannelloni beans and black olives… Whenever I cook for a certain friend who can’t eat tomatoes, I have to think hard.
We’re getting some great tomatoes in the market, including those popular in italy for salads (you eat them less ripe – they’re great). I made a salad of these with fresh mint, feta cheese, and olive oil. E da morire…
Love those fresh tomatoes, they are a staple of my garden.
I just finished a nice meal of spaghetti squash with a homemade tomato sauce filled with chopped veggies, garlic and herbs. Yummy!
I was just about to post on tomatoes on another one of my favorite forums…I absolutely LOVE them. I actually get excited when tomatoes come into season because I can’t get enough of them. Plus, my husband actually eats them when they are garden-ripe and actually have decent flavor, so at least he gets his veggies a month or so out of the year, lol. I prefer mine plain with a dash of salt and some fresh basil, but my husband likes his on a BLT sandwich. I also love good fresh salsa or a good tomato soup.
I love tomatoes and I try to integrate them in my diet everyday. Usually, I put tomatoes on my salad. But now that I know that their is a higher concentration of lycopene when cooked. I will try to eat more cooked tomato products.
I’d like to know if ketchup counts. ^.^
Seriously, I’d eat tomatoes if I could stand them, but…they taste like musty water to me. And they have the grossest texture ever. Why can’t more healthy food be good? Like walnuts or dates?
My girlfriend is Filipina and we made menudo the other day, which makes great use of tomatoes:
http://recipe.philippinecentral.com/menudo.html
I read this article about Tomatoes and I discovered many new things about this delicious vegetable.