Hello! Thanks for taking the time to reply! I can see your point, but it still does look as though it is very much peculiar to the US. AS you said yourself, it is all a question of balance. And the main problem I have with these findings is that they seem to be totally lacking! Pointing out tomatoes as being responsible for such and such an ailment may be possible in the US where people seem to have a much less balanced and less complex diet, but elsewhere in the world -- anywhere, in fact, where the traditional diet has yet to be supplanted by American junk food culture --but elsewhere it just doesn't make sense. And blaming tomato sauce -- without taking into account the innumerable ingredients other than tomato which it contains -- is laughable. Again, this may be relevant to an American slob living off cheeseburgers and coke, but I really don't think it applies to anyone leading anything vaguely resembling a healthy life. After all, the vast majority of the healthiest fruit and vegetable we know of are also harmful if consumed in large amounts: the secret is to consume them in a balanced amount, not eat just them alone.
And as for science and its conclusions, I am more and more of the opinion that it is making things worse, not better: science examines isolated, individual elements, very rarely taking the greater picture and interrelationships between things into account. Traditional medicine and health practices, on the other hand, do. When people were less healthy in the past or still are in traditional societies, it is more likely to be due to a general lack of access to food, rather than to a lack of nutritional knowledge or suitable medicine. This applies also to such concepts of acidity: what kind of acids are we talking about? In what medium? In what kind of diet? Not taking any of this into account is to me akin to current US foreign or economic policy: it assumes everyone and everything else to be subject to the very same conditions as in the US. Which might be OK if the US had something to be proud of, but currently it is one of the -- if not the number one -- worst off countries in the "civilised" world in terms of health, literacy and general culture. I know your intentions are good, but this seems to be a very dangerous approach.