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Number two on the list Fruit or vegetable?Measure a tomato A fist of vegetables Bolus and eat Scott has never eaten one The little things add up

Bolus 4 · Episode 1662

Tomatoes

Number two on the most-eaten-vegetables list, and technically a fruit. Nobody looks at a tomato and thinks carbs — which is exactly why Jenny's numbers matter: a gram a piece for the little ones, five to ten for a slicer, two for the slice on a burger. Small, until you add up everything else you didn't count.

Scott Benner and Jenny Smith, RD, CDCES, LD

Open the Bolus 4 estimator

No carb ratio and no estimator run on this one — the carb figures are the ones Jenny gives on the recording, and the bolus talk is about whether a tomato needs a pre-bolus at all. It doesn't. Bring your own ratio; the point of the page is the small numbers people leave out. 5:24

01 · Bolus 4 · Episode 1662

Number two on the list

After potatoes, the next most-consumed vegetable in the country by weight — canned and pureed included. Jenny's first move is to point out that it isn't a vegetable.

1:21

31½ lb

of tomatoes per person, per year — including the canned and pureed kind

Scott's list, by weight, from the top ten most-consumed vegetables in the US. Jenny guessed corn or fresh salsa. It's tomatoes — which, as she points out, the government seems not to know are a fruit.

Fruit or vegetable?1:51

Botanically, a fruitJenny's understanding, and Scott's lookup agrees: a fruit is the mature ovary of a flowering plant, with seeds. A tomato forms from the flower after pollination, so it qualifies — like apples, peppers and cucumbers.
In the kitchen, a vegetableIt goes in savory dishes, so that's what we call it. The distinction is cultural, not scientific. In 1893 the Supreme Court ruled tomatoes should be taxed as vegetables for trade.
For a bolus, it barely mattersVery low carb and low glycemic either way, which is why it gets grouped with the vegetables — and why it gets left out of the count.

02 · Bolus 4 · Episode 1662

Measure a tomato

Scott's guess: four or five grams for a raw tomato. Jenny's answer is the same one she gave for potatoes — it depends which tomato, so measure by the piece and by the fist.

3:22

Grape or cherry tomatoes

1carb

The small, poppable kind — maybe a gram of carb apiece at the most, Jenny says, and good nutrient quality for the money.

A sliceable tomato

Somewhere between 5 and 10 grams depending on size — the whole tomato that comes wedged up in a chef salad and never gets counted.

A thick slice on a burger

2carb

Scott's example, later in the episode: about two carbs. Not enough to matter on its own — and that is the trap, below.

Small numbers, real numbers. None of these will throw a meal off by itself. Jenny's point is that they are carbohydrate all the same, and the salad they're sitting in usually has more than people think.

Jenny's numbers · no carb ratio was set on the recording · Click any item to hear that moment

Jenny's salad math4:15

3–5g

of carb in a fist of raw vegetables

The same fist rule as the potatoes, applied to mixed greens, onions, tomatoes, peppers — very low glycemic carbohydrate, but carbohydrate.

15–20g

in a typical restaurant salad

Before dressing and toppings. Scott's warning on top of it: chain-restaurant salads can carry an astonishing number of carbs you'd never expect — look it up when you're in that setting.

03 · Bolus 4 · Episode 1662

Bolus and eat

Low glycemic — under 55 on the index is low, and tomatoes are comfortably there. Which changes the whole shape of the bolus compared with last episode's potato.

5:24

Build the bolus for a tomato5:24

Stable, low blood sugar; a whole raw tomato eaten like an apple — Scott has seen it done.

No pre-bolus to speak ofNot a quick hit. If you're going to bolus for it, bolus and eat, Jenny says — it doesn't need your typical pre-bolus consideration at all, and even less so inside a salad.
Active? Maybe nothingScott's read: out in the yard gardening, pick a tomato and eat it, he wouldn't think a bolus was necessary. Sitting still, it's a bolus-and-eat food.
Jenny's summer bowl: 10 grams, always bolusedTomato and cucumber from the garden, salt, pepper, garlic, a little feta. She averages it to 10 grams for a medium tomato and a four-to-five-inch cucumber, and absolutely boluses for it when it's part of a meal.
Look at the CGM only while you're learningIf you don't know what a tomato does to you, take a peek at an hour or two — especially if you didn't bolus. After that, you should know.

Takeaway6:52

Scott has never eaten a raw tomato

Sauce, yes — he makes it from fresh tomatoes — and ketchup, and once a baked Roma. But a raw wedge in his mouth is the skin breaking, the mush and the fibrous part all at once, and it is too many textures. Crunchy and dry is his vibe. He's 54; he says he'll try one in the next salad he sees. Salsa too, which he has also never had. Jenny's dad ate them like apples, with pepper.

04 · Bolus 4 · Episode 1662

The little things add up

Two carbs of tomato won't break a meal. Two carbs of tomato, five of roll you undercounted, six of ketchup you ignored — that's how people miss, Scott says, all the time.

12:00

Scott's burger, undercounted12:00

The rollYou swag 25. It's 30. Five down.
The tomatoA thick slice, about two carbs, ignored. Seven down.
The ketchupKetchup has a lot of sugar — another five or six carbs nobody thinks about. Now the miss is real, and none of the three would have mattered alone.

Jenny: it depends on your ratio12:38

1:20

a two-gram slice is a tenth of a unit

At Jenny's own ratio, missing the tomato makes no dent in the blood sugar. No problem.

1:4

the same slice is half a unit

At a tighter ratio — a lot of kids, a lot of adults — the tomato you ignored is a half-unit miss, and the ketchup is more.

Same two grams. Whether it matters is a settings question, not a tomato question.

Take a picture of this one

Things to remember from this one

The small numbers that add up to a miss.

~1gcarb

per grape or cherry tomato — Jenny

5–10gcarb

in a sliceable tomato, by size; about 2 for a thick burger slice

3–5gcarb

in a fist of raw vegetables; 15 to 20 in a typical restaurant salad

0pre-bolus

low glycemic — bolus and eat, or nothing at all if you're active

“A fist of raw vegetables is about three to five grams.”

Jenny Smith4:15

“If you're at a ratio of one to four, that's a half a unit of insulin that you miss.”

Jenny Smith12:38

“That's the way people miss on their meals all the time. Like, a little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit there.”

Scott Benner12:00

“If you're talking about taking the tomato and cutting it into wedges and putting a piece of it in my mouth, it seems horrifying to me.”

Scott Benner7:01

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