Author: Leticia Celentano
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Last Updated:
February 11, 2026
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But, lycopene within supplement form doesn’t appear to be effective at lower doses, both.
In addition to lycopene, different carotenoids within tomatoes include beta-carotene, gamma-carotene, zeta-carotene, phytofluene, and phytoene, all of which are regarded “to accumulate in human prostate tissue.” And, “there are also severa non–carotenoid compounds within tomatoes that [may] have [anti-cancer] hobby”—not to say all the compounds we've got yet to even signify.
But, it’s not approximately locating the only magic bullet: “The anti-most cancers results of carotenoids and other phytonutrients may additionally live within [their] mixed interest.” For instance, at the low concentrations of the tomato compounds phytoene, phytofluene, and lycopene found in the general public who consume normal amounts of tomatoes, there’s very little impact on cancer cellular growth within vitro, used one by one.But integrate them all collectively, and a non-effective dose plus a non-effective dose will become effective by hook or by crook, appreciably suppressing prostate cancer mobile increase.
And, the same synergy may be seen across ingredients. Curcumin, the yellow pigment in turmeric and curry powder, tomato extracts, and the diet E determined within nuts and seeds do little to inhibit pro-increase signaling of prostate most cancers cells—much less than 10%.But all three collectively suppresses growth signaling like 70%.
The whole is greater than the sum of its components.So, How About Instead Of Giving Cancer Patients Lycopene Pills, We Give Them Some Tomato Sauce?
“Thirty- sufferers with localized prostate [cancer]” have been given three-quarters of a cup of canned tomato sauce each day “for three weeks…earlier than their scheduled radical prostatectomy.” In their bloodstream, PSA stages dropped “by means of 17.5%.” PSA, prostate-specific antigen, is a protein produced by way of prostate gland cells, and expanded blood degrees are automatically used “to screen the achievement of [cancer] treatment.
It turned into unexpected to locate that,” in just three weeks, a “tomato sauce-based dietary intervention” could lower PSA concentrations in guys with prostate most cancers. Also, unfastened radical harm of the DNA of their white blood cells dropped by using 21%.Imagine how antioxidant-negative their weight loss program ought to were in advance, if much less than a cup of tomato sauce an afternoon ought to reduce DNA damage via more than a 5th.
Here’s the DNA harm within the prostate before the tomato sauce, and here’s after.
Just 20 days of sauce. And, what’s exciting is that “[t]right here was no affiliation between” the level of lycopene in the prostate and the protecting results.Tomatoes include an entire bunch of things, some of which may be even more effective than lycopene.
Regardless, within comparison to the lycopene supplements by myself, “the whole-food intervention” regarded to assist. To see if lycopene played any role at all, one might have to check a lycopene-unfastened tomato—within other phrases, a yellow tomato.So, what in case you as compared red tomatoes to yellow tomatoes, which have all of the non-lycopene tomato compounds, to immediately lycopene in a pill?
So, they fed people red tomato paste, yellow tomato paste, lycopene capsules, or placebo pills, after which dripped their blood on prostate cancer cells growing in a petri dish.This downregulation of the gene by means of the purple tomato consumption “may make contributions to decrease prostate cancer hazard by using proscribing cellular proliferation.” The red tomato seemed to paintings better than the yellow;
so, perhaps the lycopene helped, however now not within tablet form. “[T]his gene become no longer regulated by [the lycopene-pill serum],” indicating that maybe it’s something else.And, lycopene on my own significantly upregulated “procarcinogenic genes.