Tomato Facts

Tomatoes are a very peculiar fruit: everybody thinks it's a vegetable, but it's really a fruit, and more precisely a berry! In botanical terms a fruit consists of the ovary of the plant, with its seeds, and that's exactly what a tomato is. Its family, the Solanaceae, is also called the nightshade family, and includes other famous plants such as tobacco, potatoes, eggplants, chilli peppers, and the poisonous belladonna.

The U.S. Supreme Court declared on May 10, 1893 that the tomato is a vegetable, based on the fact that they are generally served with dinner and not dessert.

The controversy has even more importance today: tomatoes have been designated the state vegetable of New Jersey.

Arkansas has accepted it as both a vegetable and a fruit, declaring the "South Arkansas Vine Ripe Pink Tomato" to be both the state fruit and the state vegetable in the same law, citing both its culinary and botanical classifications.

Did you know that tomato juice has been the official beverage of Ohio since 1965?

A delicious tomato

Aside from these trivia and controversies, tomatoes are a very important part of our diets (and even more in mediterranean diets): we often consume it with ketchup, sauces, or eaten raw, and it would be advisable to know more about its nutritious properties!

On this site we have gathered a lot of diverse information about the tomato, both from a nutritional and botanical point of view: you will find extensive articles about the health benefits of tomatoes and lycopene.

We will guide you to all the necessary steps to buying the right tomatoes, storing them (see how to select and store tomatoes) and understanding the impact of their nutritional properties with detailed reports from the USDA Food Database (see Tomato Nutrition Facts ).

Tomatoes have lots of important health benefits, including reduction in risks for cardiovascular diseases, colorectal cancer, inflammation, prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer and thrombosis, so you should certainly consider including a cup of tomatoes in your daily diet for the maximum benefits (for more information see our article about the health benefits of tomatoes).

We also feature several articles about the tomato plant, including a very detailed history of tomatoes that describes how this wonderful fruit was imported to europe from Peru and other american lands.

We hope this site will help you live a healthier life and understand more about the benefits or making tomatoes part of your life!