Calories in Tomato, sauce

What makes tomato so powerful?

Raw tomatoes are healthy, but turning them into sauce makes one key nutrient dramatically more available: lycopene, the carotenoid pigment responsible for their red color. Lycopene is bound inside plant cell structures called chromoplasts. When tomatoes are heated and pureed into sauce, those cell walls rupture, freeing the lycopene and converting more of it from the trans isomer (poorly absorbed) into the cis isomer (far more bioavailable). Studies have shown that processed tomato products like sauce and paste yield significantly higher lycopene absorption than equivalent amounts of raw tomato. This is one of the rare cases where processing a vegetable actually improves its nutritional profile rather than degrading it. Lycopene is fat-soluble, meaning it requires dietary fat for intestinal absorption, so a tomato sauce consumed with oil or cheese delivers more usable lycopene than the same sauce eaten alone. This biochemical reality underpins the logic of countless Mediterranean dishes that combine cooked tomato with olive oil.