January 26, 2003

• Daily Dose
  January 24, 2003
  
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  Seeing red about ketchup
  
  It's pretty much common knowledge these days that lycopene, one of the main ingredients in tomatoes, can help protect against prostate cancer.
  
  Now there's more evidence supporting this finding. University of Illinois researchers report that eating tomatoes, rather than taking lycopene supplements, is also a preventive against prostate cancer.
  
  The researchers had 32 men with prostate cancer eat pasta (argh!) with 3/4 cup of tomato sauce once a day for three weeks. At the end of the study, the volunteers' levels of prostate specific antigen (PSA) went down an average of 17.5 percent and oxidative damage of the DNA in the prostate tissue was reduced.
  
  Then comes the bad advice following the inconsequential study results (the PSA test is notoriously unreliable for measuring improvement) urging people to include more pasta dishes and pizza in their diets and to make sure there's a bottle of ketchup on the table at every meal.
  
  The junk food captains of the world will love this advice. Commercial ketchup is junk food of the worst kind. Like all junk foods, it is loaded with sugar, our No. 1 addictive substance of abuse. And that brilliant red you see in the bottle is NOT lycopene, it's chemical and/or food coloring.
  
  Don't put the ketchup bottle on the table; deposit it in the garbage.
  
  You should read all "scientific" nutrition reports with extreme skepticism. And look who's picking up the tab: This study was partially funded by the company that makes Hunt's tomato sauce and ketchup.
  

  
  

  Running over medical myths,
  Dr. William Campbell Douglass II, MD

  
  

       No wonder I stopped using ketchup while still a kid! I preferred gravy on my cheeseburgers & cheese or gravy on my frenchfries. Still do!

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