05/05/2024
Just imagine if our rats could live 30% longer! This year I have gotten serous about growing my own food and have been making garden plots in my front, back, and side yards. Then as I was researching various vegetable plants I came aross a Youtube video that mentioned a new tomato first deeloped by Dr. Cathie Martin, a plant biologist at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, United Kingdom that has been developed specifically to increase health benefits, and it has a really deep purple (almost black) color.
I have always loved tomatoes with purple coloring such as the Cherokee Purple, as they have a much richer flavor than most, but I have never seen one his dark all the way through! Intrigued, I looked further into it and found that a study was done on mice which found when eating this tomato in powdered form as a supplement to their kibble it extended their life expectancy by 30%! Although this has not been tried on rats I would estimate the results would be similar.
This tomato gets its color from inserting a gene from a purple snapdragon (also edible) which switches on the gene in the tomato for anthocyanins. Anthocyanins are naturally occuring in tomato leaves and stems but little or none are in the fruit of domesticated tomatoes (until now in this variety).
Anthocyanins have antioxidants which have anti-cancer properties and also maintain vascular health. The shelf life of these tomatoes is double that of others due to the high level of antioxidants in them.
GMO often has had a bad connotation, but like anything else it is a tool which can be used for good in the right hands. I was not able to find anything that suggested that turning up the anthocyanins in a vegetable is harmful in any way; in fact just the opposite, so I went to the website where the company Norfolk Healthy Produce was selling a limited amount of the seeds to the public and finding that there was just 1 day left until they ended sales for the year I bought a pack of 10 seeds.
Hopefully I'll be able to get all 10 to germinate, thrive, and bear fruit, so I can share some with my rats. I don't know whether fresh tomatoes will be even better than the powdered form that was used with the mice, but I suspect it might be because there is less of a chance for nutrient loss than there would be in a drying process.
One of my breeding goals is to try to extend rats' life expectancy. I have found that since I've been wild foraging and feeding dandelion, clover, and violet leaves and flowers that my rats seem more robust, keep weight on better and longer into old age, are overall healthier, and I have not seen a tumor since feeding these botanicals. This tomato really could bring things to the next level! If any of my adopters have rats live longer than 4 years I would really like to know!
I'll provide updates here on my Faebook page if/when I am able to successfully grow these, and hopfully get fruit that I can give the rats and keep notes on their health and longevity.
Here is the study if you'd like to read more of the details of the outcome in mice;
Fruit-specific overexpression of a pair of snapdragon transcription factors produces tomatoes that uniformly accumulate anthocyanins at levels unprecedented for metabolic engineering. When included as a dietary supplement, the purple tomatoes increase the life spans of tumorigenic p53 knockout mice.
