LONDON: When my parents emigrated to England from Malta, they brought a fair slice of their home country’s culinary ways with them.

Maltese cuisine has a hefty Italian influence and during my childhood I remember my mother knocking up tomato sauces to accompany spaghetti.

However, the attraction to this fare is not purely nostalgic: scientists have begun to see tomato sauce as a potential weapon in the fight against major conditions, including heart disease and cancer. The humble tomato may have a lot to be proud about.

Much of the scientific interest in tomatoes has centred on lycopene. This is part of a family of nutrients, the carotenoids, which include the better-known nutrient betacarotene. Like betacarotene, lycopene promotes antioxidant activity in the body.

This gives it the potential to combat free radicals, which have been implicated in the processes that underlie chronic health conditions, such as heart disease and cancer. In theory, increasing our intake of lycopene might reduce our risk of falling foul of today’s major killers.

Laboratory evidence suggests that lycopene might protect against clogging the body’s arteries through its action on cholesterol.

While high levels of this waxy blood fat are believed to increase the risk of heart disease, it is not the cholesterol itself that is the problem. Animal studies show that only when cholesterol becomes oxidized (damaged) by free-radical molecules is it likely to bung up the arteries. Lycopene has the ability to protect cholesterol from oxidation. In one study looking at the relationship between diet and heart disease in ten European countries, a decent lycopene intake seemed to afford protection from heart disease.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.