Lycopene is an important carotenoid, mainly found in tomato, watermelon, red grapefruit and red envelope palm oil in nature, and distributed in serum and tissues in the human body. Lycopene is called "plant gold" in the West and has very important physiological functions.
After entering the human body through food intake, lycopene can play a variety of physiological functions, such as acting as a strong antioxidant, quenching singlet oxygen and scavenging free radicals, preventing lipoprotein and DNA from being oxidatively damaged, thereby preventing the occurrence of cancer. Lycopene can also form low-density lipoprotein cholesterol oxidation products to prevent the occurrence of coronary heart disease; promote the synthesis of proteins that maintain normal intercellular binding; activate immune cells.
Lycopene Physiological Functions
2.1 Antioxidant function
Lycopene can quench reactive oxygen species, eliminate free radicals in the body, and prevent their oxidation from causing damage to the human body. Oxygen is easily converted into reactive oxygen species in the body, which in turn generates various free radicals. Free radicals are compounds with unpaired electrons, which can attack other stable molecules, destroy human cells, fats, proteins, DNA, cause cancer, induce cardiovascular disease, arthritis, etc. Lycopene can effectively quench reactive oxygen species. Among carotenoids, lycopene has the strongest quenching ability to reactive oxygen species, 100 times that of vitamin E and 2 times that of β-carotene.
2.2 Anti-cancer and anti-cancer functions
Cell culture, animal experiments, epidemiological studies and other related analyses have shown that lycopene has the effect of inhibiting the increase and spread of cancer cells, and has the potential to prevent gastrointestinal cancer, cervical cancer, skin cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, bladder cancer, Pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, ovarian cancer has obvious effect. Regular intake of tomatoes and tomato products and maintaining a high level of lycopene in serum can greatly reduce the chance of various cancers.