Tomato paste usually gets treated like a supporting actor.

A spoonful goes into spaghetti sauce. Maybe a little gets mixed into soup or chili. Nobody looks at a can of tomato paste and thinks, “This could be good for my brain.”

But a new study from researchers in Spain suggests there may be more going on than just making dinner taste better.

In the trial, healthy middle-aged adults who ate concentrated tomato paste every day for three months showed improvements in certain measures of attention and memory. Researchers also saw changes in brain activity among a smaller group who underwent brain scans.

The amount wasn't enormous, either. Participants consumed about 35 grams of tomato paste a day — roughly two tablespoons.

The findings were published in the journal Antioxidants.

So What Changed?

The study began with 47 healthy adults between 40 and 55 years old. Forty-two completed the trial.

Rather than simply telling one group to eat more tomatoes and another group to carry on as usual, researchers had participants go through two different three-month periods. During one, they consumed tomato paste every day. During the other, they followed a diet designed to keep lycopene intake low. There was also a month-long break between the two periods.

After the tomato-paste phase, participants performed better on tests measuring selective attention, concentration and processing speed. They also showed a small improvement in associative memory — the kind of memory involved in connecting two pieces of information, such as remembering someone's name after being introduced to them.

The researchers weren't claiming the participants suddenly developed photographic memories. The changes were measurable, but fairly specific. And that distinction matters.

The study didn't show that tomato paste prevents dementia, reverses memory loss or somehow makes the brain younger. It looked at healthy adults and relatively short-term changes in particular cognitive abilities.

The Tomato Ingredient Researchers Are Watching

One of the main suspects is lycopene, the antioxidant that gives tomatoes their red color.

Tomatoes are a major dietary source of lycopene, and the compound can cross the blood-brain barrier. Researchers have been interested in whether its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties could play a role in protecting brain function.

The tomato-paste group had higher blood levels of lycopene after the intervention. Researchers also measured brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, a protein involved in the growth and maintenance of neurons and in memory.

BDNF showed a borderline increase after the tomato intervention. That doesn't mean scientists have proved lycopene was responsible for the cognitive improvements, though. Tomatoes contain plenty of other compounds, and the researchers acknowledged that separating lycopene's effects from everything else in the tomato is difficult.

There was another interesting piece of the experiment. A smaller group of 14 participants underwent functional MRI scans. The scans suggested changes in connectivity between certain brain networks involved in attention and cognition.

Those findings are intriguing, but they're also the part of the study that needs the biggest asterisk. The brain-imaging group was small, and the analysis was not strong enough to treat those results as definitive. The trial was also not blinded, meaning participants and researchers knew which dietary phase they were in. That leaves open the possibility that expectations or other factors influenced some of the results.

So no, scientists haven't discovered a miracle brain food hiding in the pasta aisle.

What Researchers May Have Found Is A Small Clue

The improvements in attention and associative memory are enough to make tomato consumption worth studying further, particularly because tomatoes are already a common part of the diet and the intervention was relatively simple.

But larger studies will have to determine whether the effect holds up, whether it lasts and whether lycopene is actually driving it.

For now, the takeaway is considerably less dramatic than the idea of eating spoonfuls of tomato paste to supercharge the brain. Still, there are worse things to add to dinner.

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