What’s wrong with buying ketchup for your anti-cancer diet?
The problem is that most commercial brands are full of sugar– or other sweeteners that still raise your blood sugar.
But ketchup is made from tomato paste, and tomato paste is filled with lycopene, a powerful anti-oxidant. In fact, tomato paste is a much better source than fresh tomatoes in part because the processing (heat, oil, ruptured cell walls) makes lycopene more available for absorption.
Here’s your challenge. Mix together the following ingredients:
● tomato paste from a glass jar, not a can (meaning it will likely be BPA free, but some manufacturers have owned up to the possibility of BPA in the lids of glass jars –so don’t lick the lid)
●water to thin the paste
●apple cider vinegar
Now add some spices to make it tasty. What spices, you ask? That’s your challenge–maybe start with some cinnamon and cumin, according to the Salad Girl. It’s up to you to figure out which spices work best and in what proportions.
The tastiest ketchup recipe wins a plum spot (with your credit of course) in my upcoming book, “Eat and Beat Cancer: How to Create your Own Anti-Cancer Kitchen” (coming soon– I promise.)
Eat and Beat Cancer 
Like with many other recipes, I simply substitute xylitol for sugar when making ketchup.
Xylitol is a natural polyol (sugar alcohol) that is not only virtually indentical to sugar in taste and texture, but has some intruiging health benefits. It is less caloric than sugar (by 30%), has an extremely low GI of 7 (compared to 100 for sugar) and excerts anti-cariogenic and prebiotic effects. Cariogenic bacteria can’t metabolize it at all, but beneficial lactobacilli in the gut metabolize the ~30% that is not absorbed in the small intestine to cancer-protective short shain fatty acids, like they do with other prebiotic fiber. The other 70% are slowly(!) metabolized to glucose (unlike some other polyols who are metabolized to fructose). It has been consumed in Finland for more than 70 years, where the large-scale production from birch wood was launched during a sugar shortage in World War II. Epidemiological studies from Finland have shown that those who regularly consumed xylitol instead of sugar have a lower incidence of tooth decay and diabetes. The anti-cariogenic and prebiotic effects have been confirmed in randomized controlled trials. In animal studies, a xylitol-enriched diet has been shown to prevent metabolic syndrome, to excert intriguing anti-(skin-)aging effects by surpressing the accumulation of advanced glycation endproducts and to excert beneficial effects on bone mineral density. Just search PubMed for xylitol, it is amazing!
Way too good not to sweeten your ketchup with it 😉
Some good starting points:
http://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/324534
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3128359/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15832042
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11782878
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I’ve read, though, that in large amounts it can cause diarrhea and other gut problems.
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Yes, large(!) amounts can cause diarrhea. That is more than 20 g per serving or 50 g per day for starters (if you become accustomed to it, you tolerate larger amounts). If you have developed a healthy preference for less sweet tasting foods (as I would advice anybody to do), you will never come close to such an amount anyway.
People who experience adverse effects even from small amounts, which happens very rarely, usually have a bad diet devoid of fiber and lack the beneficial gut-bacteria metabolizing the xylitol and other prebiotics, leaving it to less friendly bacteria.
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