In the Alchemist's Kitchen Vol6: The Glory of Summer Tomatoes

 The Glory of Summer Tomatoes!

 I just brought home a peck of tomatoes from a local farm stand and I have shared my bounty with neighbors, eaten fresh tomato sandwiches and salads for the last few days and still have a dozen or so plump globes awaiting transformation. I know I will make Turkish Shepherd's salad, a favorite tomato/cucumber salad, and Caprese salad, made with fresh mozzarella, basil, tomato. The flavor of fresh tomatoes is so delicious, it pains me to actually cook them, but for reasons you will see below, cooking will actually improve a tomato's health benefits.  

 

Lycopene is one of the many healthy molecules that a tomato provides. It is an antioxidant, that is a molecule that is easily oxidized (gives its electrons to oxygen) and in so doing, like a sacrificial lamb, protects us from the damaging reactions with oxygen that cause inflammatory diseases like cardiovascular disease and cancer.  Lycopene is a hydrocarbon, with 40 carbon atoms, and 56 hydrogen atoms and a molecular formula C40H56. The images below show lycopene with black balls representing the carbon atoms and white balls representing the hydrogen.  Green shading on the space filling model signifies that the surface of the molecule is non-polar, that is, it has no charge, which also means that it is not water soluble.

 

The lycopene molecule shown above is what is found naturally in the tomato, and it is the "all trans" isomer, that is long, pretty rigid, and very stable.  An isomer is one of a group of molecules with the same chemical formula but different geometry. In the picture below, a shorthand drawing of the molecule called a stick figure, you can see the top drawing, which is the long all trans isomer. It turns out that if you heat the molecule, you can create a kink in it as shown by the remaining structures.  By heating, you have created new isomers called "cis" isomers, each of which shown here has a different geometry of the molecule and an overall structure that is smaller than the long all trans isomer.  Perhaps it won't surprise you that the cis isomers are better absorbed by our bodies, and they get absorbed even better when a fat, such as olive oil, is present.  So it seems as though biology is optimized when you cook your tomatoes in olive oil.  One more reason the Mediterranean diet is so healthy!

last image from: https://www.cmaj.ca/content/163/6/739