"Inhibiting Platelet Activation with Tomato Seeds"
In the prevention of cardiovascular disease,
the consumption of fruits and vegetables is crucial.
Yes, preventing the oxidation of cholesterol may be one of the mechanisms
by which fruits and vegetables reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
However, hyperactivity of platelets is also critically important
in the development of cardiovascular disease, as I’ve covered before.
In recent years, it has been shown that platelets
are not only involved in the clotting process,
but also they play an active role in the inflammatory process
of atherosclerosis from the beginning.
And that means from childhood.
By the end of our teens atherosclerotic lesions are present
in most people living in industrialized societies,
and so suppressing the overactivity of platelets may be beneficial
not only for heart disease but for cancer and allergies,
and other disease for which inflammation plays a major role.
The antioxidant properties of fruits and veggies are well-known,
however their anti-clotting effects on platelets are less known.
Preliminary studies have demonstrated
the platelet activation suppressing activity of a variety of fruits and vegetables,
so much so they can mess up platelet function tests.
And the effects are so long-lasting,
just fasting the morning of your blood test may not be sufficient.
Out of the 16 different fruits tested, tomatoes came out #1.
The anti-platelet activation components in tomatoes are water soluble,
so you don’t have to eat them with fat,
heat stable, meaning you can cook tomatoes without losing benefits,
and concentrated in the yellow fluid around the seeds,
which is why tomato pomace beat out tomato juice, sauce or ketchup.
Pomace is basically the seeds and the peel,
which the industry throws away,
and it may be the healthiest part.
And the more tomato seeds, the better.
But this was measuring platelet activation in a petri dish.
Grapefruit came in #2 here.
And grapefruit juice at least did not appear to help when people actually drank it.
So, would drinking tomato juice actually help?
Yes.
Platelets of patients with diabetes are characterized by intensified activation,
so 20 diabetics were asked to drink a daily cup of tomato juice for three weeks
—or a tomato-flavored placebo beverage
and there was significant drop in platelet activation in the real juice group.
Works in healthy people too.
Within 3 hours of consumption, two tomatoes are good, but six tomatoes are better.
And the effects were more wide-ranging than those of aspirin
in that the tomatoes targeted multiple pathways of platelet activation.
About 1 in 4 people are so-called aspirin resistant,
meaning aspirin doesn’t work to calm down their platelets,
whereas only 3% of study subjects were found to be tomato resistant.
This finding indicates an advantage of the tomato extract’s
broad antiplatelet activity profile over single-target drugs such as aspirin,
and when researchers stuck tubes into people while they were eating tomatoes,
they found no changes in blood clotting time,
implying that supplementation with tomatoes should not result in prolonged bleeding times,
so one might get the best of both worlds, less platelet activation without the bleeding risk.
But if tomatoes don’t thin our blood, do they work?
Consumption of tomato products has been found to be protectively correlated
with a lower incidence of acute coronary events,
less development of early atherosclerosis,
and lower mortality from heart disease.
If you don’t like tomatoes,
kiwifruit recently beat them out in a test tube study of platelet activation.
Strawberries may help too,
but we have data showing kiwis may actually work in people too,
and two kiwis appeared to work just as well as three kiwis.
It appears to work for green-on-the-inside kiwifruit;
and for yellow-on-the-inside kiwifruit.
In this case, though, only one-a-day seemed to help whereas two-a-day did not,
which seems a little strange.
And there haven’t been any studies to see if kiwifruit eaters
actually have fewer strokes and heart attacks,
so the best evidence for a dietary intervention to decrease platelet activation
currently rests with tomatoes.