Tomatoes pack more cancer-fighting punch
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Avtar Handa is developing
tomatoes that contain three times as much of the cancer-fighting
antioxidant lycopene as conventional tomatoes. Photo by
Tom Campbell
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By Steve Tally
Forget the attack of the killer tomato, this is the attack of the healthy
tomato: Scientists from Purdue and the USDA have developed a tomato
that contains as much as three and a half times more of the cancer-fighting
antioxidant lycopene.
The discovery was a happy accident.
Scientists at Purdue and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural
Research Service were working to develop tomatoes for food processing
that were of higher quality and would ripen later.
They accomplished that, but in the process they discovered that the
new tomatoes also had significantly more of the antioxidant than conventional
tomatoes.
"We were quite pleasantly surprised to find the increase in lycopene,"
says Avtar Handa, professor of horticulture at Purdue.
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