Diet: Tomatoes help keep heart healthy

Eating cooked tomatoes could halve your risk of heart attacks, a new study revealed yesterday. The study, which is published in the American Journal of Epidemiology followed 3,000 men from nine European countries and looked at those who had heart attacks and those who had not.

The team from the University of North Carolina took fat samples from all the men which revealed what they had been eating. They found that in the healthy men there was a much higher level of an anti-oxidant called lycopene. The most common source of lycopene is cooked tomatoes such as tomato paste, tomato soup or pizzas, although the high cheese content of pizzas makes experts reluctant to suggest eating these.