The first commercial food product to use the CRISPR gene editing technique increases levels of GABA...
The company claims oral intake of GABA can help support lower blood pressure and promote relaxation.
In Japan, dietary supplements and foods enriched for GABA are popular among the public, says Hiroshi Ezura, chief technology officer at Sanatech and a plant molecular biologist at the University of Tsukuba.
"GABA is a famous health-promoting compound in Japan. It's like vitamin C," he says.
Sanatech's researchers increased the amount of GABA in tomato by manipulating a metabolic pathway called the GABA shunt.
Instead, the company implies it, by advertising that consuming GABA, generally, can achieve these effects and that its tomatoes contain high levels of GABA. This has raised some eyebrows in the research community, given the paucity of evidence supporting GABA as a health supplement.
To support the blood-pressure assertion, Sanatech cites two human studies: a 2003 paper on the effect of consuming fermented milk containing GABA and a 2009 paper of the effects of GABA, vinegar and dried bonito.
The papers lack good control groups, and the effects in the experimental groups could be explained by factors other than GABA, says Maarten Jongsma, a molecular cell biologist at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, who studies the effects of plant compounds on human nutrition.
To support the claim that GABA promotes relaxation, Sanatech points to six studies in humans that examined the effect of orally consumed GABA on stress, mood, fatigue or sleep.
The authors, who hailed from Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom, summarized: "There is limited evidence for stress and very limited evidence for sleep benefits of oral GABA intake."
Sanatech's tomatoes, called the Sicilian Rouge High GABA, contain about four to five times more GABA than their conventional counterpart, Ezura says.