Are tomatoes part of your fruit or vegetable intake?
Posted by kathryn in Fruit
The next post in Q & A Thursday partners the previous question: can you count tomatoes as part of your daily fruit allowance?
Despite primarily being used as a savoury ingredient, tomatoes are actually a fruit. Botanically they’re the ovary and seeds of a flowering plant, the classification of a fruit.
Tomatoes are therefore nutritionally flexible. You can count them as one of your vegetable serves or as part of your fruit intake.
Tomatoes contain vitamin C and many antioxidants, including my all-time favourite – lycopene. If you’re counting tomaties as a fruit, I’d advise you to eat them raw. This means you’ll maximise the vitamin C. If you consider tomatoes to be part of your vegetable intake, then raw or cooked is fine.
What is Q & A Thursday?
This post is part of Q & A Thursday – a weekly burst of blogging, where you get to dictate the subject matter. Q & A Thursday is all about simple, practical answers to food and diet dilemmas sent in by readers.
If you have a question you’d like answered, then either leave a comment or send me an email. For more information you can take a look at the Q & A Thursday archives.
18 October, 2007
Comments
If you count tomatoes towards your fruit intake, then is that also the case for zucchinis, aubergines, capsicums, butternut squash, pumpkins and green beans? They’re all fruits too, botanically speaking.
I’m not being sarcastic, just genuinely curious!
Looks like you’ve just answered my question from my comment on the previous post! :)
There’s a follow up clarification to this post here
Yes tomatoes do contain Vitamin C and lots of antioxidants but as I understand, Lycopene is associated with the red pigment only. I suppose that means that yellow and orange tomatoes do not contain lycopene. Is that right?
I suspect you’re right Mariana. Yes, lycopene is a red carotenoid antioxidant (it’s also found for example in watermelon). Yellow and orange tomatoes almost certainly have wonderful antioxidants by themselves though – so don’t discount.
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