Organic ketchup, lycopene and fighting cancer

Thanks, but no... Firstly, this news has been circulating for about a year now - pretty high profile things on Radio 4, the telly, etc about a year ago. Surprised that the New Scientist have only picked up on the story this late in the day.

But also, although the research is valid and indeed there's lots of lycopene in ketchup, it's actually a piece of news that was first generated by Heinz as a marketing tactic... You see, all fresh tomatoes contain lycopene, and cooking fresh tomatoes increases the levels of available lycopene in the end product. So any home made or shop bought tomato product made from cooked tomatoes has a bunch of the nice stuff in it. Ketchup, on the other hand, also contains a whole heap of white refined sugar along with its lycopene content, so it's really not a health food. Although it does taste nice ;)

Ysanne