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AS A botanist fascinated by the properties of plants, I am always curious when I uncover new claims about them. So when a colleague lamented to me about having to give up eating tomatoes (her very favourite food) over lunch the other day, fearful they would exacerbate her crippling rheumatoid arthritis, I could barely clear my plate before reaching to dig out the studies.
The first thing I discovered was that a link between tomato consumption and this painful, poorly understood degenerative condition wasn’t a new idea at all, just new to me that day. It has been a staple for health writers in newspapers,…
