Francisco Contreras, MD

Discover why the tomato is: *The next superfood *A powerful anti-cancer agent *A fountain of youth *A promoter of heart health

Francisco Contreras, MD, is a leading cancer speacialist know for his integration of conventional and alternative therapies with nutrition. He belives that the true cure for cancer is prevention and the most important cancer risk factor is the food you eat.

Intoduction
Releasing the power of Tomatoes.

"Why am I buying a book about tomatoes?'' I know you must have been wondering that as you plucked this book off of the shelf somewhere. I'll bet the question kept bothering you all the way to the cash register, out to your car in the parking lot, and all the way home to where you now sit staring at this page. It is a good question. It is a question that i had better answer if you're going to feel like you got your money's worth out of this book. It is a question that i fully intend to answer, and perhaps in more detail than you could have imagined. Interestingly enough, it is similar to the essential question that I kept asking myself as I wrote this book. "Why am I writting a book about tomatoes?" I kept asking myself that question not because I didn't know the answer but because I knew that question would keep me focused on writing about the things that would answer that question in your head. The fact is we don't know a whole lot about the foods we eat. Most of us toddle from one meal to the next with little or no understanding of the food on our plates. For example, I remember a television fast food commercial in the mid-eighties that was meant to convince viewers that one restaurant's chicken strips were better than the other's. In this commercial, a consumer asks the employee behind the counter, "what part of the chicken do these things come from?" The employee looks at him with a complete deadpan and says, "parts is parts". Recently there was a similar commercial where a group of scientist hold up a live chicken and begin examining it in search of the "nuggets." Are these commercials funny? Yes, but there is a sad grain of truth in them also. They speak of our ignorance regarding the food we eat. We are woefully ignorant of where our food comes from, how it is grown or raised, how people cannot articulate to you in any great detail why they should or should not be eating a particular food. Even people who consider themselves "healthy eaters" often base their decisions to follow a set of dietary guidelines on only a cursory understanding of food and nutrition. I believe this is why so many people "waffle " back and forth between healthy diets and unhealthy diets. They can't maintain their conviction to "eat right" because that conviction is based on certain amount of ignorance. If people want to develop healthy eating habits that are life-long, then they must strive to fully understand why certain foods are harmful to them and why others are essential. We live in a day and age when the medical community is acknowledging the incredibly strong connection between diet and health. More and more doctors are willing to consider poor dietary habits as a major contributor to the development of disease and chronic illness. Both cardiovascular disease and cancer, two of the biggest killers in the world today, have been closely connected to poor diet. Therefore, it is now apparent that to eat in ignorance is, in fact, downright dangerous. That brings us to the tomato. I want you to know what my goal is writting this book. I want you to eat tomatoes and tomato-based products. I want you to make tomato-products a regular part of your diet for the rest of your life. I want you to eat a tomato a day. I know that in order for you to really feel motivated to do that for the long-term, you must have a deep understanding of why the tomato is an essential disease-fighting food. I hope this book does more than merely answer the question, "why am I buying a book on tomatoes?" I hope this book moves you to make some minor adjustments in your diet and I hope it changes the quality of your life.

Francisco Contreras,
MD General Director,
Oasis of Hope Hospital

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