Finnish Study: “Eat Your Tomatoes, Preferably Processed.”

A few years back I read about a study showing that people who drank fruit and vegetable juice three or more times per week were 76 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than people who drank juice less than once per week.  Since my mother died of Alzheimer’s, drinking juice seemed like a sensible thing to do.  We bought a juicer and started making fruit and vegetable juice a couple of times a week, as I described in a blog post.  We have fruit juice for breakfast and vegetable juice (mixed with commercial low-salt tomato juice) for lunch or dinner.  Since then, we don’t seem to get sick very much and, when we do, we get over it quickly.  Coincidence? Maybe.

Now it turns out that the tomato juice part may also help to protect us from stroke.  A Finnish study of 1031 men has shown that those with the highest levels of lycopene had a 55% lower risk of stroke than those with the lowest levels.  Tomatoes are the best source of lycopene and processed tomato products, especially tomato sauce and tomato juice, have 7-10 times the amount of lycopene found in a single tomato.