"Turning up the heat on the red tomato during processing has the potential to give the popular garden staple added disease-fighting power, Ohio State University research suggests.More Frankenfoods?
Scientists have found that lycopene molecules in tomatoes that are combined with fat and subjected to intense heat during processing are restructured in a way that appears to ease their transport into the bloodstream and tissue. The tomato is the primary food source of lycopene, a naturally occurring pigment linked to the prevention of cancer and other chronic diseases.
In its standard structure in the average red tomato, the lycopene molecule is laid out in a linear configuration. That structure seems to hinder the molecule's absorption through intestinal walls and into the blood, said Steven Schwartz, an investigator in Ohio State's Comprehensive Cancer Center and a professor of food science and technology at Ohio State.
Meanwhile, most of the lycopene that is found circulating in human blood is configured in a bent molecular form. This means that either the human body somehow transforms lycopene molecules through reactions that have yet to be identified, or that the bent molecular structures of lycopene are much more likely to be absorbed into the blood and transported to tissue - a necessary step in preventing disease.
Assuming the latter is true, Schwartz and colleagues have devised a way to process red tomatoes - the variety preferred by American consumers - into a sauce that contains bent molecular forms of lycopene. A clinical trial conducted in collaboration with Steven Clinton, a medical oncologist and physician scientist in Ohio State's Comprehensive Cancer Center, showed that people had more lycopene in their blood after eating the specially processed sauce than they did after eating regular red tomato sauce."
Likely.
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