About the Tomato Foundation
Improving public health with peer-reviewed science
The Tomato Foundation funds research to prevent and reverse diet-related diseases.
Improving and maintaining good public health is a high priority for territorial administrations. The recent pandemic has shown the importance of strong public health systems, which have stabilised societies and economies globally. Disease prevention and reversal can reduce the physical and economic strain on public health systems. The Tomato Foundation’s mission supports this strategy.
Our personal health is known to depend largely on our diet and lifestyle choices as well as the environment we live in. Improving the quality of our diet and lifestyle, where we can, will have immediate positive consequences.
The Tomato Foundation has always supported increasing the consumption of healthy, whole food, plant-based foods, grown with no or low use of agri-chemicals, where possible. The Foundation also supports growing our collective knowledge of more sustainable food packaging, delivery systems and providing consumers with reliable, truthful information on all these topics.
The Tomato Foundation funds research that furthers our collective knowledge.
We believe only sound, evidence-based, peer-reviewed research and qualified health claims can add to consumer knowledge to improve health choices in an authentic way. The Tomato Foundation’s pledge is to only communicate scientifically truthful information supported by cross-corroborated research from multiple peer-reviewed sources.
The Tomato Foundation aims to support and provide open access dietary resources for the growing global community of Lifestyle Medicine professionals and their patients.
Over the last 20 years, medical professions and researchers have come to define health, or being healthy, as having the optimised capacity to deal with health challenges.
Strengthening our health in all regards reduces the risk of chronic diseases setting in. Lifestyle Medicine has grown into a multi-disciplinary, inter-professional movement, now a fast growing global community, of medical professionals from all disciplines of family medicine, cardiology, endocrinology and paediatric medicine.
Lifestyle Medicine addresses all aspects of health status through a holistic approach. Imbalances in diet are central to the genesis of the majority of chronic diseases. The Tomato Foundation’s way forward is to support this health professional community build on their growing success in treating the cause, rather than just the symptoms of chronic, diet-related diseases.
The Tomato Foundation acknowledges personal and environmental health are linked.
All the foods we consume have a carbon footprint. It is now well known that animal based products, meat, fish, dairy, have a larger impact on ecosystems than plant-based foods. What we eat is a personal choice. However, the consumption of unhealthy foods, heavily processed with high levels of fats and sugar and salt and other chemicals is detrimental to our own health in the same way that high consumption of meat, fish and dairy has a negative effect on our environment.
The results of our investigations are designed specifically to improve consumer knowledge so we can all make better informed choices to protect our personal health and the health of the planet we all call home.
The Tomato Foundation was formed October 11th 2011 as a legacy entity from the EU, FP6 research project LYCOCARD, which ran from 2006 to 2011. LYCOCARD’s research investigated the link between the potent carotenoid lycopene, most bioavailable from processed tomato products, and the associated reduction of cardiovascular disease risk. The Foundation has since expanded the scope of the investigation to focus on other potent bioactive compounds found in tomato.
Our research benefits from close collaboration with different sectors of the food industry including olive oil, whole grains and fresh and processing tomato.
The Foundation regards collaboration with the food industry as essential in order to effect positive change and to reach consumers with independent, truthful information.
We maintain full executive control of all aspects of the research, without external influence.