Professor Yang Yan's team of the School of Public Health of Sun Yat-sen University (Shenzhen) showed that moderate tomato intake can prevent the occurrence of new-onset hypertension

Hypertension is the most common chronic noncommunicable disease, affecting about one-third of adults worldwide and is the leading risk factor
for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases.
There are about 245 million hypertensive patients in China, and the incidence rate is still on the rise, which has become a major public health problem
.
Therefore, early prevention of hypertension can minimize the morbidity and mortality
of cardiovascular disease.

A healthy lifestyle, including a healthy eating pattern or nutrient intake, is known to be an effective prevention strategy
to reverse the rising incidence of hypertension.
Tomatoes, as a common plant food, have many health effects
.
Professor Yang Yan's team used the data of seven waves of large-scale cohort data from 1997~2015 in the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) database, involving 11,460 adults, to explore the association
between dietary tomato intake and new-onset hypertension.
The study found that the risk of new-onset hypertension decreased
as tomato intake increased compared to participants who did not eat tomatoes.
Further dose-response relationship found that there was a "J" shaped relationship between tomato intake and new-onset hypertension, and the tomato intake corresponding to the lowest risk of hypertension was about 10-13 grams per day, which was equivalent to consuming 1 medium or 2~3 small tomatoes or 5~7 cherry tomatoes
per week.
The results of subgroup analysis showed that the protective effect of tomatoes against hypertension was more pronounced
in adult women and those with healthy lifestyles (no smoking, no drinking).
In summary, moderate consumption of tomatoes, as part of a healthy diet, plays an important role
in the primary prevention of hypertension in adults in China.

Fig.
1 The "J" shape relationship between tomato intake and new-onset hypertension

On November 14, 2022, the study was published
online in the international medical journal Nutrients, titled "J-Shaped Association of Tomato Intake with New-Onset Hypertension in General Adults: A Nationwide Prospective Cohort Study.
" 。 The study was conducted by Professor Yang Yan of the School of Public Health of Sun Yat-sen University (Shenzhen) as the corresponding author, Zhao Dan as the first author, and Sun Yat-sen University as the first
.
This study has also been reported
by medical platforms such as Biovalley, Life Times, and Mednovia.

This research was supported
by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (project numbers: 82030098, 81872617) and the Tomson By-Health Nutrition and Health Research Fund (No.
5100071020294).

Link to paper: https://pubmed.
ncbi.
nlm.
nih.
gov/36432500/