Author: Nia Rouseberg
Time for reading: ~4
minutes
Last Updated:
February 15, 2026
Learn more information about use of lycopene. In this article we'll discuss use of lycopene.
But, lycopene in supplement shape doesn’t appear like effective at decrease doses, both.
In addition to lycopene, different carotenoids in tomatoes include beta-carotene, gamma-carotene, zeta-carotene, phytofluene, and phytoene, all of which might be acknowledged “to accumulate in human prostate tissue.” And, “there also are numerous non–carotenoid compounds within tomatoes that [may] have [anti-cancer] hobby”—not to say all of the compounds we've got yet to even characterize.
But, it’s not about locating the one magic bullet: “The anti-cancer effects of carotenoids and different phytonutrients can also are living within [their] combined activity.” For example, on the low concentrations of the tomato compounds phytoene, phytofluene, and lycopene discovered in the general public who eat ordinary amounts of tomatoes, there’s very little effect on most cancers cell increase in vitro, used separately.But integrate all of them collectively, and a non-effective dose plus a non-powerful dose turns into effective by some means, considerably suppressing prostate cancer cellular increase.
And, the identical synergy can be visible throughout ingredients. Curcumin, the yellow pigment within turmeric and curry powder, tomato extracts, and the diet E observed within nuts and seeds do little to inhibit seasoned-growth signaling of prostate cancer cells—less than 10%.But all three collectively suppresses boom signaling like 70%.
The complete is greater than the sum of its parts.So, How About Instead Of Giving Cancer Patients Lycopene Pills, We Give Them Some Tomato Sauce?
“Thirty- patients with localized prostate [cancer]” had been given three-quarters of a cup of canned tomato sauce each day “for 3 weeks…earlier than their scheduled radical prostatectomy.” In their bloodstream, PSA tiers dropped “by using 17.5%.” PSA, prostate-unique antigen, is a protein produced via prostate gland cells, and increased blood stages are robotically used “to display the success of [cancer] remedy.
It became surprising to locate that,” in only three weeks, a “tomato sauce-based totally nutritional intervention” could lower PSA concentrations within men with prostate most cancers. Also, unfastened radical harm of the DNA in their white blood cells dropped by using 21%.Imagine how antioxidant-poor their diet should had been ahead, if much less than a cup of tomato sauce an afternoon should reduce DNA harm with the aid of extra than a 5th.
Here’s the DNA damage inside the prostate before the tomato sauce, and here’s after.
Just 20 days of sauce. And, what’s exciting is that “[t]right here became no affiliation between” the level of lycopene in the prostate and the protective effects.Tomatoes incorporate a whole bunch of factors, a number of which may be even extra powerful than lycopene.
Regardless, in evaluation to the lycopene supplements by myself, “the complete-food intervention” regarded to assist. To see if lycopene performed any role at all, one could have to check a lycopene-unfastened tomato—in other words, a yellow tomato.So, what in case you compared crimson tomatoes to yellow tomatoes, which have all the non-lycopene tomato compounds, to directly lycopene within a pill?
So, they fed people pink tomato paste, yellow tomato paste, lycopene drugs, or placebo capsules, after which dripped their blood on prostate cancer cells growing in a petri dish.This downregulation of the gene via the purple tomato consumption “may contribute to decrease prostate most cancers danger by proscribing mobile proliferation.” The red tomato seemed to work higher than the yellow;
so, maybe the lycopene helped, however now not within pill shape. “[T]his gene was not regulated by means of [the lycopene-pill serum],” indicating that maybe it’s something else.And, lycopene alone notably upregulated “procarcinogenic genes.