As I was reading Robert Shewfelt’s website in preparation for yesterday’s newsletter I was struck by something. Shewfelt wanted to distinguish between “safety,” his main concern as a food scientist, and “healthiness,” a term he does not particularly value.
An extreme example is the case published in Lancet of a young boy who would eat nothing but tomato soup. After a while he turned orange and was hospitalized with carotenoid poisoning. He could have achieved his mission quicker if he had stuck to raw carrots. Does that make tomato soup or carrots healthy or not healthy?
The question of health is not my concern. My concern is that I could not find much about tomato soup in The Lancet. I’m sure that’s a combination of the poor presentation of results at The Lancet’s website and my vague searching technique, but I also couldn’t find anything at PubMed. ((I did find this Salt, Tomato Soup, and the Hypocrisy of the American Heart Association in The American Journal of Medicine.))
If you know of the case referred to, I would love to receive the details.