Boys, Listen Up: EAT YOUR TOMATOES!!

Tomatoes weren’t always so pretty and uniform in color, texture and size. They were once so gnarly, hairy and bumpy that they were given a serious makeover in the nineteenth century when in 1879, after years of fiddling with seeds, Alexander W. Livingston released the world’s first perfectly-perfect tomato, the Paragon.

This is not your ordinary tomato! It looks like a plum, but these Indigo Rose and Black Cherry tomatoes from Peace Haven Farm in Becket, MA are delicious and loaded with lycopene.

Sadly, its perfection was only skin deep. In perfecting its outward appearance the tomato had become less flavorful, and less nutritious with the loss of phytonutrients and lycopene.

While The Mayo Clinic has a very conservative take on the benefits of lycopene [read here], others feel waaay more optimistic. At a recent conference sponsored by the Center for Food and Nutrition Policy [CFNP], researchers reported a potential benefit for bone and skin health, and male infertility [read here]. No matter what the studies have yet to reveal, they all agree lycopene is good for you.   

Boys, listen up – EAT YOUR TOMATOES!!! Research has shown that lycopene is a powerful anti-oxidant with benefits affecting areas of the body where its concentration is highest, such as in the prostate gland. 

In her book Eating on the Wild Side, Jo Robinson gives us some great tips on how to select and prepare the most nutritious tomatoes, the ones with the most lycopene:

1.       Deep red tomatoes have more lycopene and overall antioxidant activity than yellow, gold, or green tomatoes

2.       The smaller the tomato, the higher its sugar and lycopene content

3.       Store-bought “on the vine” tomatoes are NOT field-ripened tomatoes

4.       Processed tomato products can be more flavorful and nutritious than fresh tomatoes [because they are field-ripened and processed shortly after harvest]. Canned tomato paste has the highest concentration of lycopene of all the tomatoes and tomato products in the store. Go on, find your Inner Italian Mama and ‘make-a’ some sauce!!

5.       tomatoes should be stored at room temperature to preserve their flavor [chilling tomatoes breaks down their flavor and aroma]

6.       Cooking tomatoes converts lycopene into a form that is easier to absorb [heat liberates three times more lycopene from the plant’s tissue.]

7.       Use the skin, juice, and seeds of tomatoes whenever possible. The skin and seeds are the most nutritious parts of a tomato and the juice is rich in glutamate.

8.       Lycopene is a lipid and should be consumed with oil for better absorption.

Garlic: The "Allicin Wonderland Drug"

There's no need to wear garlic around your neck, but eating it most definitely keeps the baddies away. Garlic has antioxidant, antibacterial, antiviral, anti-clotting, and anti-cancer properties BUT ONLY IF you let it sit for ten minutes after crushing or slicing it.*

Heating garlic immediately after pressing it adversely impacts its healing abilities by destroying the enzyme that triggers the all-important reaction when two substances in garlic come in contact with one another - the protein fragment alliin and the enzyme alliinase. The two won't commingle until crushed. When they join, they produce allicin - the mighty allium super hero. So chop, mince, slice, or mash your garlic but don't plunk it straight into that heated oil. Keep it away from heat for ten minutes so that the maximum amount of allicin can be produced, delivering a bounty of scientifically proven healing properties straight to your body. Garlic is known to:

• reduce heart disease as it helps prevent blood clots by decreasing the stickiness of platelets;
• lower LDL cholesterol without hurting beneficial HDL cholesterol levels;
• boost our immune system;
• lower blood pressure;
• fight certain cancers, particularly those in the intestines;
• reduce the size of cancerous tumors;
• reduce pain and other symptoms associated with rheumatoid arthritis;
• act as an antibiotic as it kills a range of microbes including viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites such as athlete's foot, thrush [a fungal infection of the mouth] and viral diarrhea. 

* This healthy tip was provided by Jo Robinson, author of Eating on the Wild Side. For more wild tips from Ms Robinson, stay tuned as Good Girl learns "a radical new way to select and prepare foods to reclaim the nutrients and flavor we've lost."

Olive a little longer: Ditch the fat-free store-bought salad dressing

Did you know that we cannot absorb some of the most important nutrients in salad greens unless the dressing or the meal contains some type of fat? That's right, friends. Stay away from fat-free dressings as they limit your absorption of the fat-soluble vitamins found in greens.   Soybean is the most common oil in commercial salad dressings and it takes almost seven times more soybean oil to get the same results as olive oil, which does the best job of making compounds bioavailable. From now on, keep it simple and healthy: make your own salad dressing using unfiltered extra virgin olive oil + garlic [crush to get all the healthy benefits of allicins] + organic apple cider vinegar + salt and pepper to taste. 

This healthy tip was provided by Jo Robinson, author of Eating on the Wild Side. For more wild tips from Ms Robinson, stay tuned as Good Girl learns from Jo Robinson "a radical new way to select and prepare foods to reclaim the nutrients and flavor we've lost."

Salad Days!

Nothing beats a bag of fresh picked mixed greens from Peace Haven Farm in Becket, MA. It's filled with wild greens, baby kale, 5 different lettuces, rutabaga leaves, mizuna flowers, arugula, pak choi, tatsoi, mustard greens, collard greens and spinach too! If you frequently eat green salads, you're likely to have higher blood levels of powerful antioxidants [vitamin C and E, folic acid, lycopene, and alpha- and beta-carotene] especially if you include raw vegetables. Tear your greens and double [even quadruple] their anti-oxidant power. For more helpful tips from Jo Robinson, New York Times Bestselling author of Eating on the Wild Side click here and scroll down to “12 Terrific Tips.” Enjoy!