From keeping your heart, gut, and liver healthy to fighting carcinogens to stay cancer free, drinking tomato juice ensures you stay healthy at all times. Lycopene, antioxidants and vitamin A among other nutrients in tomato juice aid better vision, healthy skin and hair and weight loss.
We have said many times in the past that eating bright red tomatoes is a shortcut to robust health. That’s because tomatoes are rich in nutrients like folate, vitamin C, potassium, etc. But what truly sets tomatoes is the abundance of antioxidants like carotenoids in them, especially lycopene, known to have several health benefits to offer. Tomato also offers plenty of vitamin A. It is rich in other beneficial components like vitamin E, flavonoids, phytosterols and several other water-soluble vitamins.
To make the most of the health benefits of tomatoes, they have to be eaten raw or with minimum cooking. If raw tomatoes are not your scene, the next best option is tomato juice. With a pinch of salt and cayenne pepper, tomato juice is delicious, to say the least. But first, let’s see if drinking tomato juice is worth the effort.
1. Stay Cancer Free
The presence of carotenoid lycopene is by far the best selling point of tomato juice. Lycopene is a non-provitamin A carotenoid that is responsible for the red to pink colors seen in tomatoes, pink grapefruit, and other foods. Processed tomato products are the primary dietary lycopene source in the United States.
Known to possess antioxidant, hypolipidemic and anticarcinogenic activities, lycopene is the principal bioactive compound present in tomatoes and their byproducts.What does it mean? Antioxidants scavenge on free radicals to prevent cell and tissue damage which, in turn, prevent many diseases like cancer. Apart from lycopene, vitamin C or ascorbic acid in tomatoes plays a part in preventing oxidation.Lycopene’s anticarcinogenic activities protect the body from cancer-causing carcinogens.
2. For Better Vision
Having tomato juice daily will benefit your eyes since tomatoes are rich in vitamin A.Vitamin A, also known as retinol, maintains the health of the tissues in the retina. Retinol is essential to the formation of visual purple in the retina which allows vision in dim light.
3. Accelerates Weight Loss
If you are on a weight loss diet, you might want to include tomato juice in your daily diet.Lycopene does its magic here again. Lycopene protects the body against metabolic diseases. Having lycopene helps reduce waist circumference, serum cholesterol and inflammatory adipokine levels in the body, all of which can contribute to a much slimmer self.
4. Detoxes Liver
The largest internal organ in our body deserves oodles of TLC since it does one of the crucial jobs in keeping us healthy–purifying blood that gets distributed in the body. Since liver deals with a lot of toxins, it needs some detox, too. Plant foods like tomatoes have been proven to detox liver. Tomato juice is widely considered as good for improving liver disturbance.
5. It Is Heart Healthy
One organ that will benefit immensely from a daily diet of tomatoes is the heart. It is known to have heart protective effects–it lowers LDL or bad cholesterol and increases LDL’s resistance to oxidation10 all of which mean a healthier heart. Lycopene in plasma is found to reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases manifold. Tomatoes are the best source of lycopene.
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