Are tomatoes good for you?

Improves how well the lining of your blood vessels relaxes and opens (endothelial function) and your lipid profile.

The fruit of Solanum lycopersicum, eaten raw, cooked, or as sauce and paste.

Tomatoes originated in the Andean region of South America and were first domesticated in Mesoamerica before Spanish colonizers carried them to Europe in the 16th century.

Lycopene, the carotenoid responsible for tomatoes' red color, becomes more available to the body through cooking and the presence of fat — raw tomatoes deliver much less of it in a form the body can use.

An affordable, versatile food with a large body of protective evidence.

Because cooking actually increases its key active compound, tomatoes are one of the rare foods where the traditional cooking method is also the more nutritionally potent one.

Their near-universal presence in daily cooking makes the protective evidence unusually relevant to everyday eating, not just occasional supplementation.

Persian cuisine builds many stews on cooked tomato — a modern tradition with ancient logic.

Tomatoes only reached Persia and the wider Middle East a few centuries ago via European trade routes, yet were adopted so thoroughly into khoresht and stew-based cooking that they now feel like an ancestral ingredient.

The Persian habit of slow-cooking tomato paste and sauce in oil, sometimes for hours, happens to be close to an ideal method for maximizing lycopene absorption — arrived at through taste and tradition, not chemistry.

Where tradition and science agree

• Both everyday Persian cooking practice and modern nutrition science arrive at the same conclusion: cooking tomatoes, especially with oil, makes them more valuable, not less.
• Both treat tomatoes as an everyday base ingredient rather than an occasional treatment — used in nearly every meal in some form, which is exactly the pattern the protective research is built on.

• Tomatoes are a New World plant, so no historic Persian or Old World tradition existed for them before roughly the 16th–17th century; their entire traditional Persian culinary role is comparatively recent, even though it now feels deeply embedded.
• When tomatoes first reached Europe, some believed them poisonous (as members of the nightshade family); modern science has since found the opposite — tomatoes are one of the more protective foods studied, not a food to fear.

• Cook tomatoes with olive oil for maximum lycopene absorption.
• Include in stews, salads, and sauces daily.

One small step today: Cook a simple tomato-and-olive-oil sauce tonight.

A tomato slowly cooked in olive oil is one of the most protective meals humans have invented.