Tomatoes are one of those foods with so many news stories orbiting them that you never know what to believe.
The first day, it’s a report on killing prostate cancer cells. The second day, it’s a 70 year old grandpa claiming that removing them healed his creaky joints.
For once though, almost all the claims are somewhat true, both the positive and the negative, colliding with each other in an explosion of confusion that threatens to engulf all newspaper readers in its path.
Tomatoes have some great powers for your acne and skin, but also areas where they fail compared to other fruits and vegetables.
WEAKNESS – tomatoes are nightshades
The number one acne danger of tomatoes. If you’re sensitive, then a tomato can be a tiny red grenade of acne waiting to explode inside your body.
Tomatoes are part of the nightshade family of vegetables. Most are deadly poisonous, hiding in wild woodlands, but other edible ones include potatoes and eggplants. What unites them is defensive toxins called glycoalkaloids designed to keep predators away. For example, deer will patrol their forested turf munching on berries and flowers all day, yet they’ll never touch tomatoes. They are in a class of “deer-resistant vegetables” alongside potatoes and eggplants.
The tobacco plant is also a nightshade and its main glycoalkaloid is nicotine. As a distant cousin, tomatoes contain traces of nicotine themselves, but its signature glycoalkaloid is alpha tomatine. This compound triggers such a strong immune system response that it’s caught the eye of pharmaceutical companies developing vaccines.
The result though, is allergic symptoms, which as your acne adventures may have taught you, spill very easily into new pimples. Alpha tomatine is a top inflammatory compound and every variety of supermarket tomato is packed with it.
Nightshade elimination is picking up serious steam lately. It started with athlete Tom Brady writing about it in his book TB12 Method, detailing his hyper-restrictive diet.
It’s very tough to predict nightshade sensitivity. No special genes have been identified or anything, unlike CYP1A2F for caffeine sensitivity. Non-acne symptoms include aching joints, itching, and even involuntary movements like muscle spasms. Sugar is dodgy, donuts are worse, but there’s a strong possibility that tomatoes are behind your pimples.
STRENGTH – free from other natural villains
With the classic acne dangers of fruits and vegetables though, we head in the opposite direction.
Fruit and vegetables are vital for clear skin, but two things you always have to check are sugar and FODMAPs. Sugar can spike inflammatory chemicals by 100% while FODMAPs are obscure, complex carbs which some people are intolerant to. FODMAPs are why you have to monitor onions and apples; sugar is why you must limit grapes.
In your quest to become a living encyclopaedia of acne knowledge, the sugar and FODMAP content of fruits is the first instantly recallable fact you should have.
Luckily, tomatoes are perfectly safe. Tomatoes only have 4 grams of sugar per 100 grams, versus 11 grams for grapes. They fall under “low” in every FODMAP avoidance protocol from doctors (who are increasingly taking notice these days).
All this means that you can scoff down a bag of tomatoes at a picnic with complete peace of mind, assuming that you’re a confirmed glycoalkaloid tolerator. Their only disadvantage is a smidgen of fructans, a complex sugar, part of the “P” letter of the acronym. Also, a big part of the FODMAP equation is a glucose to fructose ratio where fructose dominates (they’re the most common sugars in fruits). Tomatoes have a ratio of 1.3, not amazing, but not terrible.
For rare acne villains, tomatoes are dodgy, but for common ones, they’re clean as a whistle. However, there’s one more threat…
WEAKNESS – tomatoes contain lectins
It’s a villain which normally inhabits the realm of nuts, seeds and wheat. However, tomatoes are a rare vegetable with significant amounts of lectins hiding in their skins.
Like their ally alpha-tomatine, lectins sometime cause sudden inflammatory outbreaks of acne. However, their real speciality, their niche in the dark halls of acne villains, is slow insidious damage. Too many lectins over too many years will punch holes in your gut lining, as they stick to epithelial cells and your immune system blasts them with chemicals. Your nutrient absorption will fall and your inflammation will increase.
Some lectins are milder than others. This study found that tomato lectins cross easily into the bloodstream. However, this one found that they binded to the gut lining like normal, but didn’t cause any actual damage.
Nevertheless, tomato’s lectins don’t come close to the wrath of wheat germ agglutinin, which attacks the neurons and shaves off IQ points. Most people can hop aboard the tomato train with no worries – lectins are everywhere in foods, and you can never banish them completely. However, you can’t pop a tomato into your mouth as mindlessly as a strawberry.
If the rest of your diet is lectin heavy, full of nuts and seeds, you should tell your sleazy local tomato dealer to get lost. Likewise if you’re on a strict gut-healing protocol.
STRENGTH – tomatoes are anti-inflammatory
The fact that settles the debate once and for all is the avalanche of great anti-inflammatory studies. It’s clear that tomatoes are deadly for a small minority of glycoalkaloid shunners, but the opposite for everyone else.
Studies directly on tomatoes are mostly fantastic with a couple of easily drowned out dissenting opinions. This study put 103 healthy people on a tomato-rich Mediterranean diet, and observed no decrease in inflammatory chemicals compared to placebo. However, this 2013 experiment was superior, feeding 106 overweight or obese Iranian women 330mg. After 20 days, the inflammatory chemicals interleukin-8 and TNF-a were suppressed.
The compound that takes tomatoes over the edge, however, is lycopene. It’s also found in watermelon and papaya, but it extinguishes inflammation like dropping a giant ice cube in a volcano crater. For example:
ONE: following 26 days of a lycopene-enriched tomato beverage, the inflammatory chemical TNF-a fell by 34.4%.
TWO: lycopene added to mice cells reduced inflammation (IL-8, IL-6 and TNF-a) so strongly that their prostate cancer survival rates increased (study).
THREE: heart attack patients ate 7mg of lycopene. Their blood levels rose 4.3 fold after 4 weeks, causing markers of inflammation to fall away (2018 study).
Tomatoes live up to most fruits for their anti-inflammatory strength. That said…
WEAKNESS – poor for vitamins and minerals
This is one acne zone where tomatoes are much weaker than the average fruit and vegetable.
Make no mistake – tomatoes are not a natural multivitamin. They contain low amounts of many, but there isn’t a single vitamin or mineral for which they’re exceptional.
For vitamin A, the oily skin eliminator, cantaloupe melons contain 68%, mangos contain 21% and papaya contains 19%. Tomatoes scrape to just 16%.
For vitamin C, the sturdy skin saviour, strawberries contain 97%, pineapples have 79% while oranges achieve 88%. Per 100 grams, tomatoes only boast 22%. They’re decent but unexceptional figures, and the zinc (1%), vitamin E (3%), and magnesium (2%) are worse.
There’s a general perception that tomatoes are extraordinarily nutritious, but that’s not where their strength lies.
The real multivitamin foods are boiled eggs and kale; tomatoes are just keeping quiet and praying that their time in the spotlight doesn’t end.
Tomatoes do have the advantage of bioavailability, as a tomato batch containing just 11mg increased bloodstream vitamin C by 35%. They concluded that “tomato products are not only good sources of lycopene but also sources of bioavailable vitamin C“. Likewise, seasonal variations are another player. From the same Polish farm, the 2008 tomatoes contained more carotenoids and certain flavonoids, but the 2009 batch won for vitamin C and quercetin. However, it starts from a low base, so neither fact will be enough to send it into the acne stratosphere.
STRENGTH – tomatoes lower lipid peroxides
My favourite acne-clearing power of tomatoes. At first, it sounds deathly dull.
It doesn’t have the coolness of a cancer-busting molecular like lycopene. It doesn’t have the universal, easy to understand power of vitamin C in a google nutrition table. But lowering lipid peroxides is immensely important for clearing acne and it seems that tomatoes are matched only by garlic.
Lipid peroxides are fat-soluble free radicals; they specialise in mutating the oil sitting on your face. They drain your vitamin E and vitamin A (fat soluble antioxidants) particularly well, which are vital for acne. Take a look:
ONE: like c-reactive protein for inflammation, malondialdehyde is a cornerstone bloodstream biomarker of lipid peroxides. In humans afflicted with type 2 diabetes, simply eating cooked tomatoes lowered malondialdehyde significantly after 60 days. The Jamaican scientists hailed lycopene, but better, this was a whole tomato supplement, so anything goes (study).
TWO: lycopene suppressed prostate cancer cells by 55%, while a whole tomato extract achieved 35%. More importantly, malondialdehyde was “significantly reduced” after lycopene was applied (study).
THREE: a very interesting study. The overconfident lycopene tried to separate from the tomato family and go its own way, but the whole tomato beat it easily for reducing malondialdehyde. It was an oral rat study, and this happened despite equal quantities of lycopene in both extracts.
This is the tomato’s unique ability, like pineapple making minerals more available or raspberries being loaded with rutin.
Lycopene will play a role in this acne power, as it’s a fat-soluble antioxidant. So will other tomato carotenoids, but whole tomatoes seem unusually powerful.
Tomatoes were shown to increase vitamin E despite containing almost none; it comes from a cascade of antioxidant reactions triggered by just a handful of these common vegetables (or fruits, the debate rages on bitterly). Sometimes, scientists get ideas into their heads, and consequently, there’s a strange flood of other studies on lipid peroxides and tomatoes.
WEAKNESS – tomatoes must be organic
Of course, it’s no good if you can’t afford these powers. You might not be able to track these powers down on a retail shelf full stop, because tomatoes must be bought organically.
Tomatoes might do a fist pump at keeping deer away, but they’ve forgotten about the 10 quintillion insects in the world. You have villains such as aphids and white flies, which infect the crops with viruses. Green mites and bollworms are more traditional, just nibbling the plant into non-existence, costing farmers billions yearly.
“Late blight disease” is a fungus that appears in wet, humid weather; farmers are always searching for the small brown patches that rapidly turn to rot. That’s just a sample, and the response is industrial agrochemical bombardment. In 2019, tomatoes ranked 10th in the dirty dozen list of pesticide-containing foods. Tomatoes are a model of consistency, an example to all; in 2015, they ranked 10th as well.
That’s why unfortunately, I only recommend buying tomatoes organically. Pesticides are no laughing matter. Their acne dangers include cranking up inflammation and draining your glutathione stores. Tomatoes are in a similar boat to grapes and strawberries, but much risker than pineapples or broccoli.
STRENGTH – perfect for cooking
Tomato is one of the best culinary ingredients an acne patient can have by his or her side. However, it’s not for the reason you think.
Yes, tomatoes taste great in countless recipes. Yes, they’re so versatile that you can use them to insert acne-clearing nutrition anywhere you please. However, the really fantastic gimmick is that tomatoes are a rare food to become more nutritious when you blast them at high heat. In this classic 2002 study, tomatoes were cooked at 88C. The vitamin C decreased, but that was never their main selling point. After 2, 15 and 30 minutes, total antioxidants increased by 6, 17, and 35%. Trans-lycopene rose by 54, 171 and 164%.
Later, the guy who ate the meal felt a strange tingling sensation spread up his torso before all his pimples suddenly fell off and landed right in the bin. OK, that part was utterly fake, but the first was true. The answer will be some form of molecular cleavage, the antioxidants being released from their bonds. It happens occasionally, but tomatoes are still a rare case.
Normally, it’s the opposite. Broccoli loses 33% of its vitamin C when boiled, and 41% of its glucosinolates (study). The sulphorous antioxidants in garlic deteriorate if you so much as poke it with a stick.
That’s why tomatoes are perfect for indulging in all your acne-friendly recipe fantasies. Better, cooking destroys some of the lectins and glycoalkaloids.
STRENGTH – tomatoes are a sunlight shield
There’s rows of topical treatments that protect against sunlight. Some decrease inflammatory chemicals which UV rays increase like 8-OHdG, some reverse increases in collagen-destroying enzymes, but it’s rare for a food to be tested. Coffee is another rare example.
For example, in the ancient times of the year 2001, humans beings ate either olive oil or olive oil plus 40 grams of tomato paste. After 10 weeks, they were blasted with UV radiation, and the tomato group experienced 40% less erythema (swelling). This could translate into calmed acne very easily. Nothing happened after 4 weeks, so it’s a secret you need to be patient with. Lycopene studies have been equally fantastic, so we’re in the same boat as lipid peroxides: it’s probably lycopene supported by shadowy, unidentified compounds.
Assuming that the glycoalkaloids don’t get you, adding tomatoes to your diet could reduce the blotchiness and redness of high summer. Again, sunlight can accelerate wrinkles, but a specific scientific reason is upregulating the enzymes which recycle it, like matrix-metallo proteinases (MMPs).
To acquire this power, all you have to do is eat tomatoes. Mainstream media outlets are starting to report on this too. A newer study was nearly identical, dragging the old olive oil bottle back out of storage. Tomato paste suppressed the collagen shredding enzyme MMP-1, and this time, increased the minimal erythemal dose by 12% (the MED is the precise point at which the UV light starts swelling your skin).
The overall acne goal is to combine many such foods and gain a natural sun-deflecting armour.
The verdict
The balance of pros and cons reveals all. 5 in favour and 4 against – tomatoes are a good food for acne overall. Their reputation has simply been blown out of proportion in some corners.
To progress to the next level, you have to determine whether you are glycoalkaloid sensitive. Completing this task is the key that unlocks the rest of the tomato’s powers. It’s like a colossal iron gate looming above you; behind lies the rest of the tomato realm, but to enter, you must first solve the riddle of glycoalkaloids.
That’s your top priority. Otherwise, tomatoes are average for normal acne powers, but have a couple of special rare ones.
Thanks for reading!