 Occasionally, positive things happen in the field of cancer prevention signs to popular, good-tasting foods. Yes, broccoli family vegetables are wonderful, but maybe a hard food for the public to swallow. By contrast, who doesn't like tomatoes? But studies using high-dose supplements of lycopene, the antioxidant red pigment in tomatoes, thought to be the active anti-cancer ingredient, failed over and over again to prevent or treat cancer, and may even end up promoting it since at the high levels one can get with supplements, lycopene may actually act as a pro-oxidant. But lycopene doesn't appear to be effective at lower doses either. There's a strong protective correlation between the intake of actual whole fruit and vegetables and the incidence of certain cancers. But when we supplement with only a single compound isolated in pill form, we may upset the healthy natural balance of antioxidants. It does seem to be quite the human hubris to think we could reproduce the beneficial effects of consuming entire fruits and vegetables by giving supplements of a single phytochemical, which would normally interact with thousands of other compounds in the natural matrix mother nature intended. In addition to lycopene, other carotenoids in tomatoes include beta-carotene, gamma-carotene, zeta-carotene, phytofluene, and phytoene, all of which aren't known to accumulate in human prostate tissue. And there are also numerous non-carotenoid compounds in tomatoes that may have anti-cancer activity. Not to mention all the compounds we have yet to even characterize. But it's not about finding the one magic bullet. The anti-cancer effects of carotenoids and other phytonutrients may reside in their combined activity. For example, at low concentrations of the tomato-compene's phytoene, phytofluene, and lycopene found in most people who eat normal amounts of tomatoes, there's very little effect on cancer cell growth in vitro used separately, but combine them all together. And the non-effective dose, plus a non-effective dose, becomes effective somehow, significantly suppressing prostate cancer cell growth. And the same synergy can be seen across foods. Curcumin, the yellow pigment in turmeric, and curry powder, phyto-extracts in the vitamin E found in nuts and seeds do little to inhibit pro-growth signaling of prostate cancer cells, less than 10%, but all three together suppresses growth signaling like 70%. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So how about instead of giving cancer patients lycopene pills, we give them some tomato sauce. 32 patients with localized prostate cancer were given 3 quarters of a cup of canned tomato sauce every day for three weeks before their scheduled radical prostatectomy. In their bloodstream, PSA levels dropped by 17.5%. PSA, prostate-specific antigen, is a protein produced by prostate gland cells and elevated blood levels are routinely used to monitor the success of cancer treatment. It was surprising to find that in just three weeks a tomato sauce-based dietary intervention could decrease PSA concentrations in men with prostate cancer. Also, free radical damage of the DNA in their white blood cells dropped by 21%. Imagine how antioxidant-poor their diet must have been beforehand if less than a cup of tomato sauce a day could reduce DNA damage by more than a fifth. OK, but what did they find in their prostates? Human prostate tissue is thought to be particularly vulnerable to oxidative DNA damage by free radicals, which are thought to play a critical role in all stages of cancer formation. This may be for a number of reasons, including fewer DNA repair enzymes. Well, the researchers had tissue samples taken before the tomato sauce from biopsies and tissue samples after the three weeks of tomato sauce from the surgery. And resected tissues from tomato sauce-supplemented patients had 28% less free radical damage than expected. Here's the DNA damage in the prostate before the tomato sauce and here's after. Just 20 days of sauce. And what's interesting is that there was no association between the level of lycopene in the prostate and the protective effects. Tomatoes contain a whole bunch of things, some of which may even be more powerful than lycopene. Regardless, in contrast to the lycopene supplements alone, the whole food intervention seemed to help. To see if lycopene played any role at all, one would have to test a lycopene-free tomato. In other words, a yellow tomato. So what if you compared red tomatoes to yellow tomatoes, which have all the non-lycopene tomato compounds to straight lycopene in a pill? So they fed people red tomato paste, yellow tomato paste, lycopene pills, or placebo pills, and then dripped their blood on prostate cancer cells growing in a petri dish. Compared to those not eating anything, the red tomato serum, the blood from those who ate red tomato paste, significantly decreased the prostate cancer cells' expression of a growth-promoting gene called Cycline D1. This down-regulation of the gene by the red tomato consumption may contribute to lower prostate cancer risk by limiting cell proliferation. The red tomato seemed to work better than the yellow, so maybe the lycopene helped, but not in pill form. This gene was not regulated by the lycopene pill serum, indicating that maybe it's something else, and lycopene alone significantly upregulated pro-carcinogenic genes. Therefore, it can be stated that tomato consumption may be preferable. So what's the best way? A spouse wrote in to the editor of the Harvard Men's Health Watch, saying his or her husband wants to have pizza for his prostate, to which the doctor replied, fine, but how about a cheese-free pizza with broccoli instead of pepperoni? Or he can just drink some tomato juice.