Despite some of the headlines
accompanying a terrific small study, we're really not quite ready for ketchup
in a pill.
But one day . . .
In this study of 36 people, half of whom were normal and half of whom had heart
disease and were taking statins, adding a capsule of 7 mg of lycopene to their
daily regime had a huge beneficial effect on the arteries of the heart disease
patients, although it had no effect on the arteries of the normal folk.
What the lycopene produced was a " relaxing" effect on the muscle
cells in the arterial walls so that the arteries became significantly wider.
The expectation is (although this study was not set up to find this) that the
more open the arteries become, the less likely those people are to suffer a
heart attack or stroke due to a blocked artery (that's for a much larger, much
longer study to determine).
In the meantime, though, there doesn't seem to be much reason not to add some
lycopene to your diet even if you don't have heart disease, and the great news
there is that you don’t have to take supplements because lycopene is found in
great abundance in tomatoes, and given that lycopene is best extracted from
tomatoes when they've been cooked, a great, healthy, safe way to get more lycopene
is to eat more tomato sauce.
And even pizza.
Not sure about ketchup, though, because ketchup seems to me to be more sugar
than anything else.
