You may not have heard much about lycopene, but you have certainly seen plenty of it. Just as beta-carotene is nature’s yellow-orange pigment, lycopene is a bright red pigment, providing the color for tomatoes, watermelon,and pink grapefruit.
Generally to said, Lycopene is in the carotenoid family, meaning that it is beta-carotene’s chemical cousin, and it is actually a much more powerful antioxidant.
A study at Harvard University showed that men who had just two servings of tomato sauce per week had 23 percent less prostate cancer risk, compared to those who rarely had tomato products.
Men consuming ten or more servings of tomato products each week had a 35 percent reduction in risk, and that was true even if their tomatoes came in the form of pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce, or ketchup.
In fact, the cooking process releases lycopene from the plant’s cells, increasing your ability to absorb it.
But not all red foods contain lycopene. For example, the red color in strawberries does not come from lycopene, but from a group of pigments called anthocyanins.
Anthocyanins also are powerful antioxidants in their own right which provide the color for cherries, plums, red cabbage, and blueberries.
Here are the top foods that contain lycopene:
Lycopene
Pink grapefruit (1) => 10 mg
Tomato (1 medium, raw) => 4 mg
Tomato juice (1 cup) => 25mg
Tomato ketchup (1 Tbsp) => 3 mg
Tomato-based spaghetti sauce (1 cup) => 56 mg
Watermelon (1 slice, 368 g) => 1 mg
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