Attack of The Purple Tomatoes

I thought this was a little silly at first, but on further inspection it turned out to be pretty amazing.

Scientist at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, have created a new crop of tomatoes by altering them with genetic material from a snapdragon flower. The amazing thing about the new tomato crop goes far beyond it’s odd color, however.

The new, genetically modified tomatoes may help ward of cancer in the near future.

The deep purple color is produced by the antioxidant anthocyanin, which is also prevalent in blueberries and blackberries. The benefit of putting anthocyanin in the tomatoes has to do with it’s cancer fighting properties.

In test, mice that were especially prone to cancer survived around a third longer when their diet was supplemented with the new tomatoes.

The promising part of beefing up the antioxidant properties of the tomatoes has to do with the fact that tomatoes are such a widely popular food. The problem with many high antioxidant foods is that they aren’t widely consumed by people outside the nutrition minded community.

It’s nice to see genetic modification of food becoming much more practical as time goes on. I’ll be keeping my eye on this one.

[via The Guardian]

Dr. Ben

Tags: Food, genetic modification of food, health, nutrition, purple tomatoe, tomatoes