Ask Dr. D'Adamo

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Questions About The Diets

Lycopene Without the Tomatoes

QUESTION

I want to know what a good source of lycopene is, since tomatoes are forbidden on the A diet.

ANSWER

It should also be remembered that tossing a tomato into your salad is not going to give you all that much lycopene. Tomatoes have a very high water content, so not surprisingly you only find high concentrations of lycopene in tomato paste. You also find large amounts of tomato lectin in tomato paste.

Research confirms that lycopene from tomatoes is absorbed much better into the bloodstream if it is first processed.

OK, now for the good news: Lycopene is found in a number of other foods in addition to tomatoes. Let's take a look:

Food	Micrograms lycopene per 100 grams
Tomato paste, canned	8580
Guava	6500
Watermelon, raw	5400
Grapefruit, red*	4100
Papaya	3500
Tomato, raw	3100
Apricots, dried	864
Rosehip puree	780

There is some evidence that Texas Red Grapefruit has the highest lycopene content of all commercially available grapefruit. As you can see from the chart, raw tomato does not place very high.

The Ask Dr. D'Adamo internet advice column ran from 1996 to 2009, at which time Dr. D'Adamo's teaching and programming responsibilities no longer allowed him to devote time and resources to directly answering visitor questions. However we've recently reorganized this treasure-trove of material and made it again available to his readership. He occasionally posts new entries. These are marked with a NEW tag.

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