Recent studies including a paper from the British Society for Investigative Dermatology, have shown that a component of tomatoes could protect your skin from UV damage such as sunburns, it’s the known antioxidant lycopene. According to ststistics, approximatly 85% of lycopene in the western diet comes from tomatoes only, and the best place to find it is in tomato paste.
The BBC documentry ‘The Truth About Food’ conducted tests to establish whether eating tomato paste could help protect the skin from UV damage and UV-induced reddening. They took 23 women who were used to burning merely at the sight of the sun and asked half of them to eat 55g of tomato paste every day for 12 weeks (giving them 16mg of lycopene).
“an unbelievable 30% increase in skin protection”
After 12 weeks of rigorously following the tomato paste diet, the women were retested through a re-exposure test. The results showed that the volunteers on the lycopene diet had a 30% increase in skin protection.
This doesn’t mean that you should stop using sun block but it’s good to know that simply by increasing tomatoes in your diet you can help protect your skin from the daily sun damage which happens without us even realising.
Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7370759.stm / http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/humanbody/truthaboutfood/young/tomatoes.shtml
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