You'd have to clarify with whoever wrote up that particular diet. I imagine it would be fine for calorie-restriction diets, since tomatoes are lower in sugar and calories than most fruits, but if the diet is addressing some other issue, it would depend on the diet's purpose.

Tomato is in the nightshade family, so I certainly wouldn't over eat it. Also tomato get lots of pesticides, especially Florida grown. Which is why I grow my own. (Store tomatoes tastes like sadness anyway.)

maxjohnson: Tomato is in the nightshade family, so I certainly wouldn't over eat it.

On what basis? No food should be "overeaten", depending on how you define that,since lack of variety in a diet is in itself harmful, so anything eaten to the detriment of a consumption of a wide variety of foods is generally bad. But there's no evidence that solanaceous vegetables deserve a caution for people who don't have specific allergy or intolerance to them.

An aside. My grandmother, born about 1890, never learned to write her name, was a good gardener. She would grow tomatoes and serve them with a disclaimer ''These damn things are poison. They'll kill ya.'' To my knowledge she did this for many decades and to my knowledge no one ever died from her tomatoes.

Well, technically tomato is classified as "vegetable". Why , I don't understand. Is it because it grows on the vine ? So do all kind of melons.Anyway, fruit or vegetable, makes no difference. Lots of healthy diets call for consumption of fruits and vegetable.

For a long time people avoided tomato for thinking it is poisonous. Not all nightshade family are poison, eggplant, potato to the extent to be harmful.... Lots of bean have poison too. But again the amount of it is minute and negligible. JMO

Sey

I think that in the good old days the grocers classified anything that was sweet as a fruit and others as vegetables. I believe that technically anything with a seed is a fruit so that would include cukes, pumpkins etc and vegetables are edible leaves, stalks, roots etc.

Peter: By the culinary definition, tomato is a vegetable, botanically it is a fruit.

Culinary definitions also depend on the cuisine. Growing up, we often ate fresh tomatoes sliced and sprinkled with sugar in exactly the same place in a meal/in the day as any fruit, i.e. as a sweet dessert, sweet palate cleanser, or as a sweet snack. In East Asia, you'll see tomatoes in fruit salad and in iced desserts along with other berries.

It's not just people of East Asian cultural heritage who do this. I know some people from midwestern farm country who remember eating bowls of freshly picked field-ripened tomatoes with sugar or even sugar and cream.

Why is the tomato considered a vegetable here even though botanically it is a fruit? It has to do with taxes and a Supreme Court ruling in the 1890's.

The Supreme Court Says The Tomato Is A Vegetable — Not A Fruit

Rodney

No, it's not because of the Supreme Court, unless you're talking about regulatory classifications, which is not what we're talking about. As the article you linked to itself points out: "The court unanimously decided that the scientific classification of a tomato doesn't change common language", i.e., common usage and consideration of the tomato had already squarely put it in the vegetable camp long before any kerfuffles about tariffs came up.

So it's more like the Supreme Court ruled that it's a vegetable for the purposes of classification for taxation because that's the culinary purpose most people were putting it to, despite its obvious botanical classification as a fruit. If people had been eating it like a fruit for all those years, nobody would have had a basis to petition that it be considered a vegetable, and the Court would have had no basis to declare it a vegetable. Let's not confuse cause and effect.