Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center

By: Kathleen Phillips

Writer: Kathleen Phillips, 979-845-2872, ka-phillips@tamu.edu

Contact: Dr. Kevin Crosby, 979-845-7012, k-crosby@tamu.edu

COLLEGE STATION – Tomatoes are the Type B’s of the vegetable world: Laid-back, creative, collaborative.

Want a slice on a burger? Fine. Chopped into a salad? Great. Pureed and slathered over a pizza crust? Yum. Steeped in a winter stew? Ahhhh.

But fresh is what most consumers covet, and that’s what Dr. Kevin Crosby, Texas A&M AgriLife vegetable breeder in College Station, had in mind when he released a new variety called Hot-TY.

“It’s very heat tolerant, so if you plant it now from San Antonio to College Station south, it will start flowering within a month,” Crosby said. “And you can harvest from late October until after Thanksgiving or until there is a frost.”

Dr. Kevin Crosby, Texas A&M AgriLife vegetable breeder in College Station, explains to growers new techniques for producing tomatoes. (Texas A&M AgriLife photo by Kathleen Phillips)
Dr. Kevin Crosby, Texas A&M AgriLife vegetable breeder in College Station, explains to growers new techniques for producing tomatoes. (Texas A&M AgriLife photo by Kathleen Phillips)

The fresh frenzy is tempting Texas tomato growers statewide, serving up potential for the industry to recoup some of its steady decline over the past 50 years, Crosby believes.

In 1960, Texas growers harvested 28,500 acres of tomatoes valued at almost $7.7 million, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Only an estimated 300 acres are grown in Texas now for commercial canning, Crosby said. But last year, Texas fresh tomato yields from about 900 acres were valued at almost $4.9 million.

Here’s the catch, according to Crosby: Tomatoes are coming back for the small-scale and backyard farmers and organic growers, not large-scale commercial growers. And they are selling to grocery stores and farmers’ markets for consumers who want fresh, vine-ripe tomatoes.

“It’s growing in those areas because the value of the crop is very high in that sector, especially around metropolitan areas,” he said.

That can be seen when adjusting the 1960 price for inflation to 2016. Tomatoes in 1960 sold for $5.27 per hundredweight which would equal $42.09 in 2015, the latest year for which production figures are available. But the price per hundredweight in 2015 was about $60, almost 40 percent higher than what farmers were receiving more than 50 years ago when adjusted for inflation.

Crosby noted that vine ripe, organic tomatoes can gross $50,000 per acre these days.

Interest was obvious recently when Crosby invited Texas tomato enthusiasts – be they commercial, niche or backyard growers – to a workshop to learn the most recent tips for producing the high-dollar fruit. Crosby said that in working on a joint tomato project with the Texas Department of Agriculture, he found growers had lots of questions. More than 50 growers came to learn about the new variety, how to graft onto rootstock, what diseases are on the horizon, how to combat them and what researchers are finding about the human health aspects of tomatoes.

“Flavor and quality – that’s what people want in a vine-ripe tomato,” Crosby said. “Maybe that kind of tomato is less than 10 percent of the market, but it’s very lucrative. So theoretically, though the acreage may be less than 1,000 acres, I guarantee you they’re making a lot more per acre than when there were 40,000 acres.

“And there is a lot of interest in not just quality but in better farming practices when you’re making a profit. There is no question tomatoes are one of the healthiest vegetables, and we consume a lot of them. They deliver a lot of nutrients and minerals and are important to a lot of cuisines, so it helps that you can add that to your diet and benefit from it.”

Among the most recent research on the health aspects of tomatoes is the potential to prevent prostate cancer, according to Dr. Bhimu Patil, director of the Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center at Texas A&M.

“Some vegetables might be slightly higher in levels of phytochemicals, but you may not like them as much,” Crosby said. “Think about mustard greens. I mean, they are very nutritious, but I think people like tomatoes better.”

Nobody Can Prove That Cold-Pressed Juice Is Better for You

Fruit

IF YOU’RE THE type of modern citizen with a gym membership and/or a road bike, you’ve probably heard at least a little about cold-press juicing. Celebrities deliver breathless testimonials about their juice’s improved nutritional profile, magically legitimizing $12-a-bottle prices. And startups are popping up to capitalize on the trend—one raising $120 million by promising to deliver pre-packaged fruit, ready to be juiced on its proprietary machine.

The science, at first, sounds pretty good. Good enough, at least, to convince consumers to pay up to $2,500 for the privilege of making the right kind of juice at home with their own blender. See, most juice blenders are centrifugal, with fast-spinning blades that rip apart produce, exposing it to oxygen and heat in the process. Both of those things can degrade vitamins and phytochemicals—the things, nominally, you’re trying to consume. But a cold-press (or “masticating”) juicer crushes and squeezes, sidestepping the nutrient-killing extra oxygen and heat.

Seems legit, right?

But those claims don’t hold water (or juice). The nutrients that go into your juice are not necessarily nutrients that stay there. And they’re not necessarily the nutrients that your body is going to absorb, either.

How you make juice definitely changes the nutrients that show up in the final fluid. Plenty of research shows that cold-pressing’s high-throughput industrial cousin, high-pressure processing, does a good job at preserving more of the micronutrients in produce than the alternative, thermal processing, which raises the juice’s temperature to kill bugs within. But that generalization doesn’t apply to every nutrient. For example, different technologies don’t have much impact on minerals like calcium, iron, and magnesium.
And certain micronutrients have their own weird outcomes, changing the impact of processing on a fruit-by-fruit or vegetable-by-vegetable basis. Take tomatoes, for example. You’ve probably heard that the lycopene in tomatoes is good for you; ketchup manufacturers love to tout its health benefits. But lycopene actually comes in two slightly different structural forms, called isomers. The trans isomer of lycopene shows up in red tomatoes, but your body doesn’t absorb it well. Add heat, though—like maybe from a centrifugal blender—and those trans-lycopenes turn into cis-lycopenes, which your gut is much better at absorbing. “In some cases, the heat is helping convert the metabolites into useful, absorbable compounds,” says Bhimu Patil, director of the Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center at Texas A&M University. So cold-pressing’s lack of heat isn’t always a good thing.

On top of that uncertainty, everybody’s guts handle nutrients differently. The bacteria that line your intestines chemically transform the nutrients from your food, which can make them more or less absorbable. “I cannot say that what you see in the juices is what you see in the human body,” says Patil. In an ideal world, everyone would get their gut microbiome sequenced like Michael Pollan to help determine which nutrients will be favorably absorbed. But for now, it’s kind of a (ahem) crapshoot.

Finally, the way your gut lining absorbs those nutrients depends significantly on the other compounds that are in there at the time. Consuming fruits and vegetables with fats can significantly improve their uptake, for example. And while one of the big arguments for cold-pressed juices is that they include more of the natural fiber that occurs in fruits and vegetables, that isn’t necessarily awesome. “Fiber might actually sequester some of these compounds,” says Steven Schwartz, a food scientist at Ohio State. In other words, the fiber can prevent certain nutrients from being absorbed.

You’re detecting a bit of weaseling here—in some cases this, in some cases that. But that’s how things are with nutrition research, especially when you’re trying to figure out something as complicated as the metabolism of the hundreds of vitamins and phytochemicals in produce. “It’s expensive to follow all the nutrients through whatever processing you’re looking at,” says Diane Barrett, a fruit and vegetable product specialist at the University of California, Davis. Food scientists often use vitamin C as a stand-in for a laundry list of phytochemicals, because it’s quite susceptible to both heat and oxygen. But really reliable results would require that “every nutrient has to be studied on its own,” says Schwartz. His lab at Ohio State is beginning to do just that, analyzing the broader metabolic profiles of study participants before, during, and after they eat and drink.

Until then, if you love juice, keep drinking it (as long as you’re balancing it out with other foods, obviously). The levels of nutrients in juice certainly change depending on how you make it, but with so much variability—and with so much science left to be done—that it’s impossible to tell on a recipe-by-recipe basis which kind of blending will give you, individually, the best nutrient absorption. And it’s not even clear whether absorbing those nutrients will make you that much healthier; long-term studies of fruit and vegetable intake show the biggest effects on cardiovascular disease reduction, but scientists don’t know if juices would do the same thing. Plus, levels of nutrients and phytochemicals in your juice depend more on the quality of the produce: how it’s grown, when it’s harvested, and how fresh it is. In a big-bag supermarket, the farm-to-produce-aisle cycle can be weeks long.

That’s the important part: Is it worth shelling out hundreds of dollars for a cold-press juicer on the off-chance it’ll improve a few nutrient levels? Nobody knows. So no.

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By DAVE MCGINN

The Globe and Mail

Cold-pressed juice is the elixir for our time-starved, nutrient-deprived lives, if its devotees are to be believed. That’s part of the reason a 355-ml bottle can cost $12.

The latest health fad has become a multibillion-dollar industry and has been deemed the new “status symbol,” helped along by celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow. Companies such as Whole Foods and Starbucks are riding the trend, with a market estimated to be worth up to $3.4-billion (U.S.).

But at this point, marketing hype is running ahead of science. And the massive popularity of cold-pressed juice comes at a time when there are many initiatives to discourage us from drinking juices because of their sugar content.

In perhaps the biggest sign yet that we should be eating fruits, not drinking them, Health Canada may eliminate fruit juice from Canada’s Food Guide.

“The department is in the process of reviewing the evidence base for its current guidance to Canadians,” Health Canada said in a statement released Tuesday. “Depending on the conclusions of the scientific review, guidance for consumption [quantity and frequency] of various foods, including juice, could be updated in the future.”

The statement was released following a report on the Canadian Medical Association Journal website that Hasan Hutchinson, director general of Health Canada’s office of nutrition policy and promotion, recently implied at the Canadian Obesity Summit in Toronto that the agency may remove juice from its dietary advice.

The Heart and Stroke Foundation released its own statement on Wednesday applauding the Health Canada announcement.

“This is a huge step in the right direction,” Manuel Arango, the foundation’s director of health policy, said in the statement. “We need to provide clear messages to help Canadians make the healthiest choices, and conveying that juice is not a healthy alternative to fruit is definitely in the best interest of Canadians’ health.”

Meantime, cold-pressed juice marketers continue to make a compelling sales pitch: The spinning blades of traditional centrifugal juicers expose fruit and vegetables to heat and oxygen, both of which degrade nutrients. Most store-bought juice has been pasteurized, which also involves heat. But cold-pressed juice is squeezed through an auger, meaning there is no heat (and thus the juice is “cold” pressed).

But experts say there isn’t enough scientific support for the claims that cold-pressed juice is any better for us than other kinds. Even if it does contain more nutrients, they may pass right through our guts.

“Cold-pressed may definitely have some benefits compared to other types of processing,” says Bhimu Patil, director of the Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center at Texas A&M University. “The question is: Is that processing helping the absorption?”

He adds, “We just assume there are [more] nutrients, but if they are not absorbed into the system, they may or may not be helpful.”

Larger amounts of nutrients don’t necessarily mean greater health benefits. For example, we know that fresh, or “raw,” orange juice contains more vitamin C than frozen, concentrated OJ. But even a single 355-ml serving of juice made from frozen concentrate provides about 200 per cent of the recommended daily amount for adult women and more than 150 per cent of the recommended amount for adult men.

“So aside from enriching the vitamin C content of the sewage system, it’s not clear what the benefits of more vitamin C would be,” Susan Barr, a professor of nutrition at the University of British Columbia, said in an e-mail. “Of course, taste is another issue entirely, but that [in combination with cost] is personal,” she added.