In the 1830s, merchants sold tomato ketchup as medicine.
In 1834 physician John Cook Bennett of Ohio declared that tomatoes cured diarrhoea and indigestion and protected against cholera. He published ketchup recipes, and soon merchants were selling 'tomato pills' as a concentrated extract. Rival makers accused each other of fraud, and by the 1840s the craze faded. What survived was ketchup – as a sauce, not a drug.
Useful: When a food gets marketed as a miracle cure, it usually has a long tradition behind it.
Source: daily.jstor.org