Can tomatoes protect your skin?
There is a magical component in tomatoes that research is beginning to show could protect our skin from UV damage from sunburn. It’s called lycopene and it is a very effective antioxidant.
About 85% of lycopene in the western diet is obtained only from tomatoes and the best place to find it is in tomato paste.
Our test was to establish whether eating tomato paste could help protect the skin from UV damage and UV-induced reddening. We took 23 women who were used to burning merely at the sight of the sun and asked half of them to eat 55g of tomato paste every day for 12 weeks (giving them 16mg of lycopene).