Lycopene Is Still Garbage

Young Again.org

Lycopene Is Still Garbage

- Roger Mason

There are over six billion people on this planet and only one of them is exposing the fact that lycopene is useless, promotional garbage. No one else on earth is bothering to do this. In The Natural Prostate Cure actual human blood serum analysis studies are cited. Over 30,000 real men prove beyond any doubt that lycopene has no relation whatsoever to prostate health.

Tomatoes are not and never have been a healthy vegetable (botanically a fruit) and were considered poisonous, inedible ornamental plants for centuries. They are a member of the toxic Nightshade family and have large amounts of not only solanine but also tomatine. Solanine and tomatine are toxins. The poisons in just one tomato a day for a year would kill your entire family if taken all at once. Scientific fact. Nightshade vegetables have been shown to be a major cause of arthritis and other illnesses. Potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are all Nightshade vegetables and should be generally avoided.

Folks, the natural supplement industry is as bad as the Used Car Dealers Association. The entire business is full of liars, cheats, crooks, charlatans, thieves, psychos and snake oil peddlers. This is why garbage like lycopene, chondroitin, noni juice, resveratrol, policosanol, Tribulus, maca root, deer antler velvet, sex stimulants, GH secretagogues, impotency cures, baldness remedies, modified citrus pectin, and all the rest make billions of dollars a year in profits just in the U.S.

If you go to PubMed and type in “lycopene” you'll find some “studies” that, on the surface, seem to show great therapeutic value for this nutrient. The closer you look, however, the less you see. If you look really closely you'll see nothing.

Most of the recent studies are using blood plasma measurement instead of blood serum. Lycopene is oil soluble and “hydrophobic” (will not dissolve in water). Lycopene can only be accurately measured in the fatty blood serum, and not at all in the watery blood plasma. Any scientist who measures plasma lycopene is prima facie stupid. At UCLA (Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers Preview 2001) they claimed low plasma lycopene was correlated with prostate cancer. At Harvard Medical School (Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers Preview 2004) the doctors also suggest low plasma lycopene levels are associated with prostate cancer. At Yale University (Journal of the American College of Nutrition 2004) doctors claimed low plasma lycopene is associated with death from mouth and throat cancers. At Umea University in Sweden (Cancer Causes and Control 2001) they claimed plasma lycopene protected women against breast cancer. Again at Harvard Medical School (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2004) doctors said high plasma lycopene levels protect women from cardiovascular disease. Harvard (Edward Giovannucci) measured plasma lycopene (Cancer Research 1999) and claimed low plasma levels were correlated with more prostate cancer. Plasma lycopene levels have no validity at all since lycopene simply cannot dissolve in the plasma. A real study at Harvard Medical School, doctors found 50% MORE lycopene in actual human prostate cancer tissue (Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers Preview 1996) than healthy prostates.

On the other hand the Institute for Social Medicine in Berlin (American Journal of Epidemiology 1997) measured “subcutaneous buttock adipose tissue” -aka ass fat- and claimed lycopene protected against heart attacks in men. Give me a big break.

Many of the lycopene studies use food questionnaires with such moronic questions as, “how much pizza have you eaten in the last month?” Or, “how much ketchup do you eat?” Now pizza and ketchup are really great health foods, right? This kind of foolishness simply has no place in the scientific arena. Many of these food questionnaires show no relation at all to how many tomato products are eaten and ANY kind of disease. The Imperial Cancer Research Fund (British Journal of Cancer 1997) clearly said, “Lycopene is not associated with (prostate cancer) risk.” Edward Giovannucci, one of the biggest promoters of lycopene, admitted (Journal of the National Institute of Cancer 1998) that lycopene intake was irrelevant to prostate cancer. Why doesn't the media tell you about them? Did you know that the only real source of lycopene is COOKED tomatoes in oil? You can literally drink a gallon of tomato juice a day and not raise your blood serum lycopene one iota. So, asking people how many fresh tomatoes and tomato juice they remember eating is totally meaningless.

A very large number of studies are simply paid advertisements by the people who make and sell lycopene supplements. Many of them, by law, are marked “paid advertisement” if you get the actual study out of the original journal and not just an Internet summary or the media puppet on the 6:00 PM news. At the University of Illinois (Experimental Biological Medicine 2002) the researchers used a major name brand (given to them by the manufacturer of course) instead of plain, generic lycopene. At Wayne State University (Proceedings of the American Association of Cancer Research (1999) the same exact thing was done by the same lycopene producer. Several of the Wayne State University “studies” were clearly marked as paid advertisements. Can't they afford a few dollars worth of regular generic lycopene?

The bottom line is that two studies were done on the serum of over 30,000 real men and found no relation at all between the blood levels and occurrence or severity of any kind of prostate disease. At the University of Hawaii and University of Cincinnati (Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers Preview 1997) 6,860 men were reviewed. Their blood serum lycopene levels were unrelated to any type of prostate disease. In fact both cancer patients and healthy controls had exactly 13.4 mcg/dl of serum lycopene on the average.

At the National Institute of Health (Journal of the National Cancer Institute 1990) 25,802 men were reviewed. This is the largest such study in the world. Their blood serum lycopene was measured and compared to their medical records. No relation at all was found with serum levels and prostate disease. They did find a protective effect for retinol (vitamin A) however. One serum study was done at Yale University and the National Cancer Institute (America Journal of Epidemiology 2002) that claimed lycopene was protective against prostate cancer, but then admitted, “In conclusion, the results are not statistically significant…”!!!!! What were they smoking? The results were almost exactly the same.

If lycopene had any value, your author would sell you the best, strongest, least expensive lycopene in the world and write articles telling you the great benefits you would get by taking it. You are going to hear more and more pseudo-science on this for both men and women because there is so much PROFIT in it. That's all this is about- making money by lying to you. Meanwhile there is only one person in this world who is pulling the curtain back and showing you what a scam all this is.