You probably already have tomatoes in the fridge or on the windowsill. They end up in salads, on sandwiches, in pasta sauce and on top of pizza. Most of us eat them without a second thought.
Researchers have pulled together the best studies on tomatoes and found something worth a second thought. An umbrella review in Food & Function, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, pooled the leading meta-analyses of tomato and lycopene trials.
The review found that 5 to 30 mg of lycopene a day, roughly the amount in one or two medium tomatoes, lowered systolic blood pressure by about 2.4 mmHg. The researchers rated the evidence as high certainty. Diastolic blood pressure also dropped, by about 1.3 mmHg.
Those numbers look small on paper. But even a few millimeters off the top number of your blood pressure is linked to fewer strokes and heart attacks over time.
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What the older heart data adds
Longer-running data on tomato eaters points in the same direction. A systematic review in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition pooled 28 population studies on tomato and lycopene intake.
People with the highest tomato or lycopene intake had a 14 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease than those with the lowest. The same analysis linked the highest intake to a 26 percent lower stroke risk.
These figures come from observational studies, so they show a link, not proof that tomatoes cause the drop. But the pattern across trials and population data is why the newer umbrella review landed on high-certainty wording for blood pressure.
The signal from the cancer data
Tomatoes also keep showing up in cancer research. A 2025 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Nutrition pulled together more than a hundred prospective studies on tomato and lycopene intake. Together they tracked over 108,000 cancer cases during follow-up.
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People with the highest tomato intake had an 11 percent lower risk of dying from cancer than those with the lowest. People with the highest lycopene intake had a 16 percent lower risk. The link was strongest for lung cancer mortality.
This is observational data too. It cannot say that tomatoes alone are doing the work. But lycopene, the red pigment in tomatoes, is the common thread researchers keep pulling.
Why cooked tomatoes with oil do more
How you eat them matters. Lycopene is fat-soluble, which means your body absorbs more of it when some fat is in the meal. Nutrition researchers note that healthy fats such as olive oil may improve the body's uptake of lycopene.
Cooking helps too. Heat breaks down the tomato cell walls and shifts lycopene into a form the gut takes up more readily. In practice that means a simmered tomato sauce with a splash of olive oil delivers more usable lycopene than the same tomato eaten raw and plain.
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One or two tomatoes a day, or the equivalent in sauce or paste, is the range the trials kept landing on. That fits a bowl of pasta with marinara, a BLT at lunch, or a simple tomato salad dressed with olive oil at dinner.
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This article is made and published by Mie Hermansen, who may have used AI in the preparation.