RE: Are Tomatoes Really Bad For You?
A thought-provoking article! However, I have to say that I have NEVER met a single person - vegetable consumer or producer - in either France or Italy (not exactly countries known for low average health and bad diets) who thought that tomatoes could be bad for your health. Same goes for here in Nagano, Japan (the region with the highest average life expectancy in the world) despite the fact that many tomatoes are grown and sold. Might this story not be more about US governmental policy than actual health? I mean, we all know that the vines and leaves of the tomato plant are not edible but the fruit are, right?! And as for the fruit/vegetable debate, I can't help but feel that it is pointless as there are lots of "vegetables" that are also fruit. In fact, "vegetable" is, in my opinion, a very vague term used roughly to designate commonly consumed plants, whereas "fruit" is a precise botanic term. Surely the only people who are surprised to learn that tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergines etc are all fruit are people who have no knowledge of botany...
Awesome to hear from you! Yes, I might consider that. Unfortunately, there is scientific evidence pointing to the acidic qualities of the tomato and it's interaction with the skeletal system of mammals. I have yet to read any scientific results or studies to the contrary. I have though read plenty of studies from the US government about how awesome the tomato is for you, also through major state run universities.
I am sure you can find a hundred more. The focus is on Lycopene. Which is very good for you. But the fact that the fruit is highly acidic is a major cancer contributor. Since cancer thrives in a acidic environment, the question is, whether or not the lycopene counteracts the saturation of the acid in the body.
Therefore, while there may be qualities of the tomato that are good for you, the overall tomato, as published in scientific results, show that highly acidic foods leech calcium from bones and create a great environment for cancer to start.
1st world countries have a lower age/mortality rate, due to the medicines that one must consume to regulate our lifestyles. Imagine if we were to eliminate the bad things from our diets, and have no need for medicines, just how long we could be living.
I have no intention of removing them from my diet completely, but I will be significantly reducing them in my diet.
As far as the fruit/veggie theory, I put it in there because fruits have a far greater restriction on them legally than do vegetables. I look at the fact that they disregarded the fruit so, as to, satisfy the ease of importing the fruit. Yes the US gov is a notable deceiver of it's people. This is due to many reasons the main one is money. I am sure that there was not a lot of scientific evidence used on the safety of the food we ate back in the 1700 and 1800's. In this day and age I think we are all realizing that we are living out of balance, taking some of that chaos and putting it back into balance might change the world. :)
Hello! Thanks for taking the time to reply! I can see your point, but it still does look as though it is very much peculiar to the US. AS you said yourself, it is all a question of balance. And the main problem I have with these findings is that they seem to be totally lacking! Pointing out tomatoes as being responsible for such and such an ailment may be possible in the US where people seem to have a much less balanced and less complex diet, but elsewhere in the world -- anywhere, in fact, where the traditional diet has yet to be supplanted by American junk food culture --but elsewhere it just doesn't make sense. And blaming tomato sauce -- without taking into account the innumerable ingredients other than tomato which it contains -- is laughable. Again, this may be relevant to an American slob living off cheeseburgers and coke, but I really don't think it applies to anyone leading anything vaguely resembling a healthy life. After all, the vast majority of the healthiest fruit and vegetable we know of are also harmful if consumed in large amounts: the secret is to consume them in a balanced amount, not eat just them alone.
And as for science and its conclusions, I am more and more of the opinion that it is making things worse, not better: science examines isolated, individual elements, very rarely taking the greater picture and interrelationships between things into account. Traditional medicine and health practices, on the other hand, do. When people were less healthy in the past or still are in traditional societies, it is more likely to be due to a general lack of access to food, rather than to a lack of nutritional knowledge or suitable medicine. This applies also to such concepts of acidity: what kind of acids are we talking about? In what medium? In what kind of diet? Not taking any of this into account is to me akin to current US foreign or economic policy: it assumes everyone and everything else to be subject to the very same conditions as in the US. Which might be OK if the US had something to be proud of, but currently it is one of the -- if not the number one -- worst off countries in the "civilised" world in terms of health, literacy and general culture. I know your intentions are good, but this seems to be a very dangerous approach.