Dr Rupy: Welcome to the Doctor's Kitchen podcast. The show about food, lifestyle, medicine and how to improve your health today. I'm Dr Rupy, your host. I'm a medical doctor, I study nutrition and I'm a firm believer in the power of food and lifestyle as medicine. Join me and my expert guests where we discuss the multiple determinants of what allows you to lead your best life.
Dr Rupy: Today we are diving into the world of tomatoes, one of the most consumed fruits globally with a rich heritage and controversy as to whether it is healthful or harmful. I'm always asked whether patients should be eating nightshade family ingredients from potato to eggplant or aubergine, whether it can exacerbate arthritis symptoms, whether it can cause stomach acid and even exacerbate IBS. So today we're going to go into the benefits of tomatoes, the compounds we find in them, as well as how to get the most out of this nutrient-rich ingredient with food pairings, processes and more, and why some people may have issues with the humble tomato. If you love this kind of deep-dive content, then you will love the Seasonal Sundays newsletter that the team and I put together each week that dives into a seasonal ingredient, its history, nutritional medicine benefits and how to use it in the kitchen. You can find the link to sign up to that free newsletter that we send out every Sunday in the caption in whatever podcast player you're listening to. And also you can check out the Doctor's Kitchen app for free to get access to all of our recipes with specific suggestions tailored to your health needs and new recipes added every month. On to the podcast.
Dr Rupy: Should you be eating tomatoes? We're going to be talking about why some people have issues with tomatoes and other members of the nightshade family, what the benefits are, looking at both big and small studies. We're going to talk about the compounds that we find in tomatoes and why they might be beneficial. And we're going to do a little history tour as to where even tomatoes came from, as well as the best ways to choose and cook with tomatoes to get the best nutrient value out of them. This podcast kind of came out as a result of people saying whenever I use tomatoes, I can't eat tomatoes, it worsens my GORD, or GERD as the Americans say, or it worsens my arthritis. And we're going to talk about some of the reasons as to why tomatoes can be an issue for certain people, but that why they might be beneficial for others and figure out how you can tell whether tomatoes are a good addition to your diet or not. Okay, so starting off with, we usually think of tomatoes as a vegetable. Actually, botanically, it's a fruit. It's one of the most consumed ingredients globally. Most of us eat them in one form or another on a weekly basis, whether it's in a sauce or a marinade or raw or cooked down into a delicious stew. You also get them in juices and tarts and all the rest of it. What we're going to be doing a dive into is its link to human culture as well as its impact on our health as well. And if you are a reader of the Seasonal Sundays newsletter, you'll recognise some of the patterns that we're going to be using in today's podcast because we do a deep dive into different ingredients every single week. You can sign up in the caption down below. It's completely for free and people are absolutely digging it. So, three takeaways before we even start. If you don't have time to get right to the end. The first thing is that the fruit has its origins in South and Central America, which is pretty incredible. It dates back to the ancient Mayans, thousands of years ago. Modern tomatoes are obviously very different from their wild ancestors. We've completely changed the look and feel and the nutrient profile of these ingredients. And the third thing is that they're a source of several really important nutrients: vitamin C, folate, vitamin A, potassium, as well as these bioactive compounds that we'll get into in a minute, ranging from carotenoids and flavonoids and the like as well that are linked to health-supporting effects. Okay, so let's dive into the history first. Tomatoes are now a global staple, and they're found in so many different dishes from around the world, whether it be Indian cuisine, Mediterranean cuisine, Mexican cuisine, of course. How did they become such a global staple? Well, if you step back into the landscape of South America 80,000 years ago, there was a weed-like plant with small, tiny fruits growing completely wild. And the results from some genetic studies show that this wild plant that was growing around Ecuador most likely is most closely related to the modern tomato as we know it today. And if you fast forward another 70,000 years to around 7,000 years ago, people around present-day Mexico, they started to domesticate these small fruits and actually form larger tomatoes. And in fact, the word tomato comes from the Aztec word tomatl, that's T O M A T L. And it's still a bit of a mystery as to how this wild plant actually moved from Ecuador to Central America, but it's most likely going to be due to human movement, birds, natural migration using routes like that. At that point, tomatoes are mainly cultivated in South and Central America, and it's not until thousands of years later in the 15th and 16th centuries that you have colonists bringing domesticated tomatoes back to Europe. And it's why we find it as a central part of Spanish and Italian cuisine because those are the guys that were using it most readily, while in France and Northern Europe it was a little bit later. So initially, actually, the Northern Europeans thought of it as an ornamental plant that was thought to be toxic. And you know, there might be some reasons as to why some of them found it toxic because you can imagine somebody eating a wild tomato plant and having a negative reaction when we dive into the reasons as to why there might be risks with the tomato plant and other Solanaceae family plants, the nightshades as they're otherwise known. So through the history, these tomatoes have undergone a long process of domestication and these fruit sizes have grown from being these tiny blueberry-sized tomatoes to cherry size and obviously the very, very large buffalo-sized tomatoes that you find in Italian cuisine. And these breeders around the world have selected plants for attractive traits like massive yield, for example, colour, taste, sweetness. And that's why we find the red, scarlet or yellow varieties more popular, but you do get green and purple varieties and they're very in shape as well. So most of us are thinking of a tomato that's spherical shaped, but you get them oblong shaped, oval, even pear-shaped ones as well. And you've got like massive varieties of those. If you've ever gone to a farmer's market, particularly in the UK now, you get heritage tomatoes and you get all these different wonderful sizes, particularly in the summer, which is why I'm releasing this podcast right now. As a result of going into certain varieties, we've had to rely on pesticides and fertilisers because this selection for high-yield varieties has limited the selection of the wider tomatoes. So when you're going for more monocultures, that's where we have a reliance on pesticides because they're more prone to issues that would have, they would have protected themselves through natural diversity. So compared to their wild relatives, the relationship with soil microbes that stimulate the growth and resistance to normal pathogens has been lost, which is why, you know, I've done a podcast on pesticides and organic and the reasons as to why we have a lot more reliance on them in another podcast as well. So the tomatoes that we have today look and taste very differently from their wild ancestors, but it's incredible to know that this is one of the first plants that was domesticated for all those years and years in Central America and found its way to Europe and in lots of our dishes. Health potential. So a lot of people think of tomatoes when you think of a healthy meal. You think of a salad with tomatoes and stuff. And there are lots of reasons as to why we find them healthy. And they are very healthy in my opinion anyway. Tomatoes are a source of several important nutrients, and these include vitamin C, which you'll find in lots of different fresh fruit and vegetables, but also vitamin A, folate, potassium as well. They also contain a range of bioactive compounds, and these can be broken down into three core ones: carotenoids, flavonoids and phenolic acids. So carotenoids, there are a major class of bioactive compounds in tomatoes, and the most common one that you've probably already heard of is lycopene. The reason why you've heard of it is probably because you've seen a headline about prostate cancer and the fact that it is due to lycopene, this carotenoid that's found in cooked tomatoes or found in higher amounts in concentrated cooked tomatoes, has been linked to prevention and even in the management of prostate cancer in its indolent form or less aggressive form. There's also gamma-carotene, beta-carotene, lutein that are great for your eye health, for example, that you find in tomatoes as well. Flavonoids are another class of bioactive compounds of which you find in very brightly coloured ingredients like berries. They have neuroprotective and cardioprotective effects that we see in lab studies, animal studies and in human studies as well. And you have phenolic acids, things like chlorogenic and caffeic acids, similar to what we find in coffee. And we know through those large observational data, those large observational studies that coffee has a lot of beneficial cardiovascular benefits as well. So there might be some benefits in tomatoes as a result of those caffeic acids and and other phenolic acids. Let's talk a bit about why people, some people have issues with tomatoes. Now, as a doctor, I've seen and see many people with arthritis, all various types of arthritis, the inflammatory joint condition of various causes. Sometimes it's autoimmune, sometimes it's degenerative, sometimes it's a result of overuse, repetitive strains. A lot of people have come to me and said, I can't eat anything from the nightshade family. And I think initially, as a doctor who didn't know much about nutrition or didn't think to do a dive into nutrition, I just kind of brushed it off as a sort of, well, it's an association that they've made up in their mind and that's why they're having these issues. There are certainly reasons as to why people have genuine allergies to certain compounds in tomatoes, why the acidity of certain foods can be problematic for certain people as well, particularly with those who have gastro-oesophageal reflux disease. And that's, we say it differently to the Americans. In American, in America, you guys call the oesophagus with an E, so it's GERD, whereas we call it with an O, OE, which is GORD. And there are reasons as to why acidic foods can be problematic for people with GORD or GERD. And then there are some compounds that can exacerbate arthritis as well. And there are a bunch of other associations with other conditions that I'll briefly touch on. So allergies, why might someone have an allergy to tomatoes? So you can have an allergy to many different ingredients. The common ones that most people are aware of are nut allergies, shellfish, egg, etc. There are eight common allergies that most people are aware of. There are certain compounds in tomatoes that have been found, certain proteins that have the ability to trigger an allergic response. So if you find yourself consuming a tomato, it could be as a result of a number of different proteins. One of which is a glycosylated tomato protein, also something that I probably going to butcher the pronunciation of, is beta-fructofuranosidase. There's also profilin and a whole bunch of other these proteins. You don't need to know the name of them because you're not going to be tested for them. But the allergic response that you'd probably be very privy to is when you consume tomatoes, either in a raw or a cooked form, you might get symptoms such as skin flaring, wheezing, flushing. And that's a result of histamine release that's causing that allergic reaction. So most people who understand and acknowledge that they have an allergy to tomatoes have these symptoms and it's quite easy to spot. Sometimes it might be a little bit more subtle and in some times it might also depend on the type of tomato that you're consuming as well, whether it's cooked or raw, and even the actual type of tomato because within different coloured tomatoes, as we'll get into later, there are different amounts of these different proteins. So a green tomato or a smaller cherry tomato might not be as problematic as certain other larger tomatoes or different varieties. And there is a connection there as well with migraines. So that's allergies to tomatoes. Acidity. So tomatoes are technically classed as an acidic food. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to change your blood pH. It's not going to change your urinary pH, but there are certain organic acids, prominent organic acids that you find in tomatoes, and the two most prominent ones are citric and malic acids. And patients with typically severe gastrointestinal disease, such as reflux, when you have quite significant reflux, they can be recommended to reduce the consumption of acidic foods, including tomatoes and tomato products, along with other sort of lifestyle advice. And we will do a podcast on GORD because it's certainly something that I think has more of a relationship with other types of foods that we consume, namely sugar, processed foods, deep-fried foods that are quite heavy, and other inflammatory foods as well. This, I think, is quite, is more on the side of anecdote. So when people are suffering with GORD, I think there's more things that you can do in the initial circumstances than removing tomatoes completely from your diet as the first call. So getting on top of sugar, getting on top of weight, getting on top of other things that could be irritating the oesophageal lining is probably more pragmatic than removing tomatoes from your diet, as they have health benefits, as we'll talk about a little bit later. But if you've done all those things and you still have symptoms or you feel that your GORD could be better managed, then removing tomatoes might be an additional strategy to entertain as well. There was a 2014 population-based study published in the BMC that found no association between tomato products and the severity or frequency of GORD. So again, there's conflicting evidence on this, just to state that this isn't a blanket rule, and you've really got to individualise your diet and what you want to try to improve symptoms to your own response to it. Okay, so that's acidity. Arthritis. So within tomatoes, this is going to sound scary, and it shouldn't, shouldn't be, but there are something called glycoalkaloids, tomatine is one of the prominent ones, and solanine as well. And you get these not just in raw tomatoes, but also in derived tomato products as well. Tomatine is mildly toxic, and it's found not just in tomatoes, as you'd imagine, tomatine to be found in tomatoes, you find it in aubergine, or as the Americans call it, eggplant, you'll find it in potato, and tobacco, basically nightshade family plants. And the other word that you'll find associated with nightshade is a bit more colloquial, Solanaceae, I might be pronouncing that incorrectly as well, but Solanaceae family of ingredients have these mildly toxic glycoalkaloids. These can be irritant to people with arthritis, and it can be from lots of different types of arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis. So again, if you do have symptoms and you feel that you might be triggered by certain ingredients in your diet, it might be worth trialling removing all Solanaceae or nightshade-based plants from your diet and then monitoring symptoms. I think doing these little personal experiments is the best strategy that anyone can do. So doing a rigorous symptom diary two weeks before any intervention, so you understand what your baseline is, and then doing the intervention, in this case it would be removal of certain ingredients, ensuring that everything else stays the same essentially, which is very hard to do in nutrition, and then monitoring those symptoms as a result of your intervention. And then if you find a benefit, you know, it's hard to discount placebo, but, you know, let's say there is a significant benefit, then it might be something that you want to explore as a strategy going forward. There are other issues, but I think these are probably lesser so with tomatoes. So there are case reports of issues with IBS, and that might be due to the seeds of tomatoes that can be irritant to certain people with IBS. Again, IBS is a big umbrella term. It could, it can mean a whole bunch of different things. It can, it can be caused by a number of different issues as well. So it's very hard to say tomatoes, IBS, remove them and you feel better. It's very hard to say that. But again, personal experiments, something that you might want to consider as well. So the answer, I mean, the question that I always get is, should you avoid tomatoes? In my personal opinion, you know, yes, they are a member of the nightshade family, the Solanaceae family that include all those other ingredients. And I think you should exercise caution when consuming those plants if you do have an established condition like arthritis or GORD, but generally, I think there's little evidence that nightshades are harmful. And actually, each person's tolerance is unique. And I think our health effects or our tolerance effects are always in flux. Discounting those with genuine allergies, I think as a result of improving our microbiota, improving our baseline state of inflammation, these can all have a more tolerant effect of certain ingredients in your diet. So there might be certain people who can't tolerate tomatoes today, but at some point in the future, they might be able to better tolerate them because they've made changes to their lifestyle, their diet, etc, etc. The bottom line is that you've got to focus on what works for you and doing those little personal experiments and diversifying actually what we tend to eat because if we're just eating tomatoes or if we're just eating brassica vegetables, of course, you're lacking that diversity, you're probably going to be exposing yourself to high amounts of a certain ingredient that can lead to issues as well. In terms of overall health, if we're looking at those less reliable but like larger studies, typically epidemiological studies or observational studies, they are linked to beneficial effects. And whether that's because tomato eaters or regular tomato eaters tend to be healthful people, tend to be those who also consume a variety of other ingredients and take better care of themselves, it's hard to disentangle. But I think, you know, in terms of long-term health and disease prevention, there are a number of studies that demonstrate the inclusion of tomatoes is certainly something beneficial. So clinical trials looking at the effects of tomatoes in human health, there was an umbrella review published in Food Chemistry in 2021, and this combined data from multiple meta-analyses and 20 health outcomes to provide a real like large overall sort of eagle-eye view of the evidence. And the authors actually concluded that the intake of tomatoes was A, generally safe, and B, beneficial for multiple health outcomes, including all-cause mortality, i.e. if you have tomatoes, you're less likely to die than someone who isn't consuming tomatoes, coronary heart disease, so cardiovascular health, cerebrovascular disease, prostate cancer and gastric cancer. So including tomatoes in your diet because of all those nutrients that we already talked about, with the anti-inflammatory effects, with the anti-cancer effects, with the promotion of cardiovascular effects, is likely going to have a positive effect on your health. There are smaller studies that look at the protective effects of tomatoes, specifically looking at dietary lycopene. Dietary lycopene is like the darling of all tomato studies, and they suggest benefits on metabolic syndrome and male infertility. And recently, there was evidence that the consumption of lycopene or lycopene-rich products, that we'll get to in a second because a lycopene-rich product would be a cooked tomato product that is concentrated in something like a puree or a triple-concentrated puree, may reduce the impact of ultraviolet radiation on skin. That isn't to say that if you have a tub of puree, then you don't need to wear your sun cream, but there might be what we call a photo-protective effect on skin from having high amounts of lycopene in your diet as well. There are some other bioactive compounds from the carotenoid family of phytonutrients that can also have photo-protective effects, but it's not enough to put your sunscreen to one side. And I always recommend going for a natural sunscreen as well. So one that doesn't have a cocktail milieu of all these unnecessary preservatives and additives that might actually have a net negative effect on your health. I would always go for a good quality natural sunblocker when you're getting exposures to high amounts of sun, although in the UK we don't seem to be having that. The research that looked at the study that I mentioned earlier, there are again, just to caveat everything, there are issues with these studies. There's heterogeneity in the way the studies were conducted. We also have no idea about the varieties of those tomatoes that I talked about. So when people talk about tomatoes, they're just lumping it into one big thing. But as you know from listening to the collection of different nutrients, there's going to be variations depending on how wild the tomato was, what kind of heritage tomato it is, you know, how that tomato was grown, that can affect the lycopene content, the ripe, the ripening effect, the colour of the tomato, is it green, yellow, red, etc. So, you know, it's very hard to draw that association, which is why I'm not a fan of arbitrarily having lycopene supplements or just looking at one particular bioactive compound. It's likely going to be that combination that has that synergistic effect on health promotion than the inclusion of a singular nutrient, no matter how sexy it sounds and and how successful it is in a rat study. And the, during the ripening phase of tomatoes, there is change in colour. So typically, if you think of a traditional, quote unquote, tomato, it will go from green to red. And the reason why is because you get accumulation of these carotenoids in the skin in response to light during that ripening process. So not only are they, are these carotenoids giving the colour, they're also giving flavour as well. So carotenoids don't have taste, but by controlling the pigments that also control the colour of tomatoes, you can actually have an impact on determining the aroma and the flavour of your tomato as well. And that's because there's an accumulation of a whole bunch of flavour-related compounds like sugars, which can affect the taste and aroma of it. And you also get these VOCs, also known as volatile organic compounds. And today, the tomatoes that we taste is really a balance of all those different contributions from sugars, volatile organic compounds and acids as well that you find. So next time you smell a tomato or you taste a tomato, just think about all these different compounds that you're consuming in different amounts. And that's why, you know, some will taste like completely insipid and floury, like a lot of my European friends who come over to the UK and they taste a tomato for the first time from a regular supermarket. But then you get a heritage tomato or something that you might find in season, like right now, from a farmer's market, and you'll be able to taste something completely different. Sometimes acidic, sometimes sweet, you know, look at the colour of it, look at the differences in the, the colour profile. It really does have an impact on the experience of consuming that tomato as well.
Dr Rupy: I want to talk about something that I'm super excited about, which is food combinations. I don't think there's enough talked about when it comes to food combinations. And food combinations can have a demonstrable impact, a significant impact on the nutrients that you can absorb from your food. It's not just about like the cooking time or minimally processing, which obviously I agree with and I think that's very important, but also the combination of different ingredients that can heighten the nutrients that you consume. So lycopene, just to focus on lycopene for this example, lycopene is better absorbed when tomatoes are cooked with specific ingredients. And when I think of tomatoes and cooking, I think of a wonderful sort of combination of onion, shallot, garlic, peppers. I think of making a sofrito, I think of making a curry base with ginger, garlic, mustard oil, all those different sort of combinations. Well, it turns out that particularly with olive oil, onions, garlic, leek, brassica vegetables, so your cauliflower, broccoli, rocket, and shiitake mushrooms, they contain compounds such as the fats in those compounds like you'd find in olive oil, for example, or sulfurous compounds that can modify the chemical structure of lycopene that makes it easier for our bodies to absorb. So when you combine these in a thermal mixture and you cook them together, so this is a degree of natural processing, if you like, when you're, you're doing a little chemistry experiment every time you sit down to make a risotto or whatever it might be, or a stew or but when you're combining those ingredients, you're actually making the lycopene a lot more accessible, a lot more available. So a traditional dish like a sofrito or a gazpacho, they're not just incredible for the flavour benefits, but they also have incredible and higher health benefits as a result of you being able to absorb better those ingredients. And this is taken from a paper called Enhanced Z-isomerization of tomato lycopene through the optimal combination of food ingredients. So just to give some clarity as to what Z-isomerization is, most lycopene is in an E configuration, which is a different sort of structure compared to Z, and Z appears to be more bioavailable in terms of how we're able to absorb that lycopene. And those ingredients that I just mentioned, the shiitake mushroom, garlic, onion, brassica vegetables, extra virgin olive oil, I'm adding extra virgin olive oil because I promote extra virgin olive oil rather than just olive oil, but olive oil seems to be the one that they used. This promotes thermal Z-isomerization of lycopene, which makes it a lot more bioavailable. So pretty incredible. I love coming across gems of information like that that will not only get you cooking a lot more and also thinking about the little chemistry experiments that you're doing in your own kitchen, but also like how, how exciting that a traditional dish like a sofrito, the start of a traditional dish is actually healthful as well. The other thing to think about, processed versus fresh tomatoes. So which is better, you know, are there differences? So more processed tomato products than raw tomatoes are actually consumed in the Western world, so United States and likely the UK as well. And in the UK, 46% of tomatoes are sold as fresh, whilst the rest are sold as canned. So there is definitely more processed tomato products out there. You'll find them in things like sauces and ketchups and pastes and that kind of stuff. Preservation or processing can mean a plethora of different things. It's not all takeaways and found on pizzas and and curries that are like made in batches and then frozen, for example. Process can also mean frozen, jarred, canned, and these are generally pretty nutritious. You're minimally processing them. And there is data that suggests that different processing methods have different effects on those compounds that you find in tomatoes. So there isn't a simple yes or no answer as to, okay, if I have processed tomatoes, that's not good for me. If I have raw tomatoes or if I cook them in my own kitchen, that's going to be better for me. Generally, I think tomatoes that are jarred or canned are pretty good. And if that's a convenient way of getting tomatoes and all those wonderful beneficial compounds, as long as you're not allergic to them or the other things that we talked about earlier, that's a great way to to to add it into your into your diet. The things that I would be wary of are when you look at the back of a product and you see added sugar, sodium chloride, you add ingredients that are not typically found in a household kitchen. That's when you're moving from the processed or the ultra-processed classification from one to four. So just as an aside, we have the Nova classification of which there are four groups. Group one is unprocessed or minimally processed food. So that's basically a raw tomato in this case. And then the further you move into the groups, you get to number four, which is ultra-processed. So a typical ultra-processed tomato-based product might be a takeaway curry where there's loads of tomatoes in it, but it's also got preservatives, additives, stabilisers, gums, everything to homogenise it. That's where you get an ultra-processed food. Group two is processed culinary ingredients. So that could, you could argue that would be a jarred tomato with maybe a little bit of salt in it. And that, that for me will still have plenty of benefits in. So I don't think we always need to be opting for raw at every, at every step of the way. So we have a better understanding of tomatoes in all their glory. I want to bring this back to information that you can take to your shop and to your kitchen. So my top tips for choosing and cooking for flavour with tomatoes, they're an ingredient to master for sure, for nutrition and flavour. I hope by the end of this pod, you will be excited about tomatoes as much as I am. They're super versatile and when you look at the flavour profile of tomatoes, depending on what you do to them, they, they're pretty unique because you can exert and extract different flavours all the way from sweet and fruity to umami and meaty. You can definitely get the umami out of tomatoes by cooking them, by searing them. If you have like, if you think of a typical fry up, an English fry up, that grilled tomato with the charring on it has got an umami flavour. It should taste salty. Depending on where you get your tomato from, if the tomato tastes floury, then you're not going to get that. But from a real tomato that's got sweet sugars in it, you can get that Maillard reaction when you grill it and that will give out the umami flavour. You'll definitely be able to get that extract that. So when you're shopping for tomatoes, you want to look for, look, tomatoes are grown all year round for starters, and I think the highest quality tomatoes are obviously going to be those in season, and you will be able to taste the difference. No matter what sort of stage you are in your culinary journey, you'll be able to taste the difference between a floury, forced-grown tomato versus a an in-season tomato. The in-season tomato is going to taste a lot sweeter, a lot fresher. You're going to be able to taste a lot more complexity in it. The out-of-season forced tomato is going to taste like flour, and actually the texture of it is going to be a lot more sludgy as well. It's not going to have as much bite. They're typically quite hard to chop as well. Make the most of fresh tomatoes when they're in season. They tend to grow in the warmer months of spring, summer, early autumn. So right now, great. And during the cooler months, like so when you're in the winter, for example, you can enjoy the jarred versions or the canned versions or dried. And you can even make these yourself if you have time as well. A question I'm asked a lot is, if your tomatoes are coming from the UK, when should you be looking for them? It's around June to mid-September. And we can get good quality tomatoes grown in the UK. There are some air mile benefits there as well, but we tend to, you know, have some good quality tomatoes. However, if they're grown in like locally heated greenhouses, this is where growing, sorry, buying local might not necessarily be ideal. And you might want to look for, you know, imported tomatoes from Europe, from Spain, for example, that actually might have a better environmental impact and it might have a better flavour impact as well. On the further flip side, so this is where it gets very complicated when choosing and buying any ingredient really. You could have this sort of back and forth with lots of different trade-offs. And everything is a trade-off. That's something you have to be aware of. Spain, as an example, is the European leader in terms of pesticide sales. So you could argue that tomatoes tend to have a lot more pesticides sprayed on them in certain European farms, so you might want to opt for organic. They tend to be picked less ripe in Europe because they've obviously got some travelling to do. So when they arrive on the supermarket shelves, they will naturally ripen that way, whereas British tomatoes are vine-ripened because there's less of a of a of a delivery challenge. And there's also polytunnel British tomatoes as well, which I think are great, and we can get some some really good ones there as well. I would probably opt for smaller producers if possible, but again, this gets into like a a privileged conversation where, you know, those who can afford the best tomatoes can obviously choose to buy from smaller producers who are transparent about their produce, but it's not accessible to everyone due to cost. We also had in the UK a tomato shortage this year due to lower than average temperatures in Spain and Morocco. And so large suppliers of salad veg in the UK were struggling and buying from small suppliers means that you're getting more information about the availability rather than this sort of illusion of all year round abundance. And you can adapt a bit more to what's available in season. But again, that comes down to culinary skill as well. The organic question, I sort of alluded to this earlier. So tomatoes might be one of those ingredients worth buying organic if you can. We did a podcast on organic produce recently. They appeared on the 2019 list of fruit and vegetables most likely to contain more than one pesticide in the UK. And in a study carried out in 2016 in Spain, tomatoes showed the highest percent of pesticide residue. More data should come out in the following year as tomatoes are part of the listed ingredients that we test for 2023. And if you want more information on that, there's the organic podcast that I've done that will be available on YouTube as well, with the lists that have the most commonly ingredients with a mixture of pesticides as well as the highest amount of pesticides as well, which are not necessarily the same thing. Which tomato is beneficial, that has the best benefit? It's impossible for me to even answer that question as to whether you should go for a Roma tomato, a heritage tomato, a certain type of buffalo tomato. You know, cherry tomatoes are great for snacking. We're always snacking on those in my household. Classic tomatoes are really good for stewing and cooking down. If you get a tomato and you don't like the flavour of it or it doesn't taste like it has any flavour whatsoever, that's a perfect stewing tomato. So don't throw those away because you can concentrate whatever nutrition there is by stewing it down in a pan with some other ingredients. Again, packing with onions, olive oil, leeks and extra and those extra fats to absorb a lot more of those nutrients for whatever nutrients you're finding there, you're going to get a lot more from that combination of food ingredients as well. So that's a definitely a good hack for getting the most out of whatever you can afford. And I mean, they're just, they're great for barbecuing as well. If we can get a barbecue in this year, that'd be epic. So look, my, my culinary pairings for tomatoes, obviously they go really well with basil and cucumber, but anchovies, anything that's really salty and umami, I think tomatoes are a really good pairing. Aubergine, again, another nightshade family, but again, really, really good in terms of the combination, grilling with courgette or zucchini, as the people in the states would say, oregano, and even watermelon. Watermelon, tomato, a bit of feta cheese, a bit of extra virgin olive oil, salt, that's all you need to make an incredible, incredible side salad. So, yeah, try them mixed with feta, chilli, pickled red onion, for example, fresh mint, lemony dressing, that's, that's one way I would do it. And then go for a gazpacho as well. And just know that when you're combining it in a gazpacho, which is, you know, cucumber, pepper, extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar, onion, blended up, add a little bit of cold or ice water to just thin it out a little bit as a cold summer soup. It's a wonderful, wonderful dish. And you can make it your own. You can change the acidity, you can change the salt just by adding a few of those extra ingredients to make it your own. So look, that's a, that's a deep dive into tomatoes. We're going to be doing other ingredients as well. Remember that certain people have issues with tomatoes. It's understandable if you think about the allergic potential of certain proteins that you find in tomatoes. It's understandable because you do have some acidic acids in tomatoes, malic and citric acid that can be in high amounts that can irritate some people's GORD. And you also have some alkaloids that can irritate people's arthritis as well. If you don't fall into that camp, I think Solanaceae family ingredients like eggplant, tomatoes, actually do have health benefits looking at the wider studies and those smaller studies as well. And there are a variety of ways in which you can get all the nutrient compounds from tomatoes in a better way by combining it with some of those food ingredients as well as good quality fats as well.
Dr Rupy: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Doctor's Kitchen podcast. Remember, you can support the pod by rating on Apple, follow along by hitting the subscribe button on Spotify, and you can catch all of our podcasts on YouTube if you enjoy seeing our smiley faces. Review show notes on the doctorskitchen.com website and sign up to our free weekly newsletters where we do deep dives into ingredients, the latest nutrition news, and of course, lots of recipes by subscribing to the Eat, Listen, Read newsletter by going to thedoctorskitchen.com/newsletter. And if you're looking to take your health further, why not download the Doctor's Kitchen app for free from the App Store. I will see you here next time.
