Fighting wrinkles
Q: So, lots of good health news today!
A: <suspiciously> Yes?
Q: Eating tomatoes prevents wrinkles and skin cancer! And it’s going to be tomato season soon.
A: Not convinced
Q: Why? Did the people have to eat too many tomatoes? Is that even possible?
A: No tomatoes were involved in the study. People took capsules of oil with tomato extract high in lycopene or lutein.
Q: Sounds a bit of a waste. But still, reducing wrinkles and sun damage generally must be good.
A: They didn’t measure wrinkles or skin cancer either.
Q: So what did they measure?
A: Activity of some genes related to skin damage by ultraviolet light.
Q: And these were significantly reduced, right?
A: Yes, but ‘significantly’ here just means ‘detectably’. It doesn’t necessarily translate into a lot of protection.
Q: Do they have an estimate of how much protection?
A: The Herald story says an earlier study found taking lycopene supplements to be as effective as an SPF 1.3 sunscreen.
Q: Only SPF 13? Still, if that’s just from the supplement it’s pretty impressive.
A: Not 13. SPF 1.3.
Q: Ok, so that’s not so impressive. But tomato season and sunscreen season peak at the same time, and every bit helps.
A: Actually, if it really is the lycopene, your horiatiki salad isn’t going to work — lycopene isn’t well absorbed from fresh tomatoes.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »