Tomato (canned/crushed)
Vegetables · Nightshades
A tin of plain tomatoes is one of the safer things in the cupboard: half a cup (100 g) is rated green, carrying 0.06 g of fructans and 0.12 g of excess fructose. The jar of pasta sauce on the shelf beside it usually is not, and the difference is almost never the tomato. It is the onion and garlic listed underneath it.
Last updated 4 September 2026Serving sizes for tomato (canned/crushed)
Half a cup of canned or crushed tomatoes, about 100 g, is rated green.
Tested serving sizes
| Serving | Amount | Main FODMAP | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1/2 cup | 100 g | Fructose 0.12 g |
Breakdown for 0.5 cups
Is tomato (canned/crushed) low FODMAP?
Canning is heat in a sealed tin, and it neither adds sugars nor takes them away, so crushed tomatoes land close to where they started: 0.06 g of fructans and 0.12 g of excess fructose in half a cup, with lactose, GOS, sorbitol and mannitol at zero. The fructan figure sits below the 0.1 g point where that group begins to count towards a rating. What changes the answer is anything that went in before the lid did, so this rating describes plain whole peeled, chopped and crushed tins, while anything sold ready-flavoured needs its ingredient list read.
Tomato (canned/crushed) and IBS: what to know
Half a cup is a cooking measure rather than a plate, which is where the arithmetic gets interesting. A standard tin runs to roughly four of those serves, so a sauce built on one tin and shared between two people puts twice the tested amount in front of each of you, and there is no second data point to say where that lands. Tinned tomato also tends to sit underneath everything else at the same meal, next to a stock, a paste and a starch, so it is worth reading the rest of the pan before you decide the tomato was at fault.
Gut-friendly ways to eat tomato (canned/crushed)
Cook the sauce instead of buying it. A tin, a good glug of garlic-infused oil, salt, and basil or dried oregano gives you a marinara that is gut friendly by construction, and half an hour of simmering does the rest. Most jarred versions, plain marinara included, are built on onion and garlic and are rated red here. If cooking is not on the cards, low FODMAP pasta sauce is a real product and rates green. The same tin also carries a curry, a shakshuka or a braise with no allium anywhere in it.
Frequently asked questions
Is jarred pasta sauce low FODMAP?
Usually not, even the plain-looking ones. Jarred marinara is rated red in this guide because onion and garlic sit near the top of most ingredient lists, and a single tablespoon of onion already carries 0.4 g of fructans, past the 0.3 g high threshold on its own. Certified low FODMAP sauces exist and are green. Otherwise a tin of tomatoes and half an hour is the dependable route.
How much canned tomato can one recipe use?
The green amount is half a cup per person, so a tin divided four ways stays inside it and a tin shared between two does not. Cooking for two, use half and freeze the rest, or pad the sauce out with grated courgette, capsicum or carrot, which stretches the volume without adding tomato. Freezing changes nothing about the FODMAP content either way.
Does draining canned tomatoes lower the FODMAPs?
Not usefully, and it is not the same trick as rinsing a tin of chickpeas, where GOS genuinely leaches out into the brine. A tin of tomatoes is tomato flesh sitting in its own juice, the tested amount already includes that liquid, and the serve is green as it comes. You would lose the best part of the tin and gain very little.
Are tomato soup and passata the same as tinned tomatoes?
No, and they are rated separately. Canned tomato soup is red here, because a soup is a finished recipe with an onion base rather than fruit in a tin. Passata is strained tomato and tomato paste is reduced much further still, which is why paste has its own entry and its own spoon-sized serve. Check the page that matches the thing in your hand.
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