Have you heard of the tomato effect?
In 1984, Dr. James S. Goodwin published a paper in Journal of the American Medical Association in 1984 outlining what he called the tomato effect. He pointed out that not until the 19th century were North American cultivating tomatoes; before that point, they believed tomatoes were poisonous, despite the face the European had already been consuming them for nearly 300 years. In 1820, Robert Gibbon Johnson ate a tomato on the courthouse steps in Salem, New Jersey, and survived, forever changing public perception of the fruit.
Dr. Goodwin went on to use this to explain the tomato effect: when an efficacious treatment for a certain disease is ignored or rejected because it doesn’t make sense in the light of accepted theories of disease mechanism and drug action.
In 2007, Canadian researchers published an article in the Psychological Bulletin using the tomato effect to show a reluctance of conventional medicine to accept nutrition as a valid treatment for mental disorders.
Since the 1920s, there have been many studies on individual vitamins (especially B vitamins and vitamins C, D, and E), minerals (calcium, chromium, iron, magnesium, zinc, and selenium), and vitamin-like compounds (choline). Recent investigations with multi-ingredient formulas are especially promising. However, without a reasonable conceptual framework for understanding mechanisms by which micronutrients might influence mood, the published literature is too readily dismissed.
As we have shared countless times here on the blog, there is a growing body of research showing the connection between diet and mental wellness, covering both individual nutrients and whole diets.
It’s time the public start accepting that nutrition is no longer alternative medicine, but an critical component of comprehensive mental health care treatment.