The healthful Mediterranean diet often includes a sauce known as sofrito, or tomatoes cooked in olive oil. Sofrito is rich in lycopene and other beneficial compounds from tomato, olive oil, and even from the lipid or fat matrix holding the ingredients together. In laboratory experiments involving obese rats, those fed sofrito had higher food and calorie intake than control rats, but they did not gain more weight than the controls.¹⁰
 
Through beneficial effects on nitric oxide, sofrito protected against vascular changes associated with obesity that ultimately lead to significant cardiovascular and metabolic complications. This supports the use of sofrito as a dietary strategy to help prevent vascular changes linked to obesity.¹⁰
 
Similarly, feeding sofrito to pigs with high LDL (bad) cholesterol protected them from developing coronary artery disease by reducing oxidative damage, enhancing nitric oxide production, and improving HDL (good) cholesterol activity.¹¹