Researchers have demonstrated that tomato juice eliminates bacteria that can damage people’s digestive and urinary tract health as well as the specific bacteria that causes typhoid fever, a crippling tropical illness.
Salmonella Typhi is a human-specific pathogen that is frequently found in food. It not only causes food poisoning symptoms but also the potentially fatal typhoid fever, which remains a major global public health concern despite decades of medical advancements.
The Cornell University team that made the discovery originally intended to identify the specific antimicrobial peptides in tomato juice that gave it its remarkable anti-Salmonella properties.
The scientists looked at the tomato genome to identify the antimicrobial peptides that were involved after first confirming that tomato juice does, in fact, kill Salmonella Typhi.
The most important finding is that tomato juice effectively eradicates bacteria that can damage people’s digestive and urinary tract health, including Salmonella Typhi and its hypervirulent variants.
Specifically, the group discovered in their recently published work antimicrobial peptides that can destroy these infections by compromising the bacterial membrane, which encloses and holds the pathogen in place.
The fact that the FDA has not recorded a single case of a product recall or advisory from a major food company due to Salmonella contamination involving tomatoes or tomato juice as far back as February 2018 may support the findings.
The public’s desire to eat and drink more tomatoes as well as other fruits and vegetables is something the researchers hope will happen when they inform them of the study’s findings.
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