A recent study found that eating one avocado per day for six months had no effect on waist circumference, belly fat, or liver fat in overweight or obese people. It did, however, induce a small decrease in dangerous cholesterol levels.
A team of researchers, including Penn State academics, revealed that individuals who ate avocados had better diets throughout the trial. This was the largest and most comprehensive study on the health effects of avocados to date, including a huge number of participants and a long study duration.
Earlier, smaller studies indicated a relationship between consuming avocados and decreased body weight, BMI, and waist circumferences; however, this study encompassed a considerably bigger sample.
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The study “provides evidence that avocados may be a healthy complement to a well-balanced diet,” according to Penny Kris-Etherton, Evan Pugh University Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Penn State, despite the fact that avocados had no effect on weight gain or belly fat. In this study, eating one avocado per day resulted in no weight gain and a modest drop in LDL cholesterol, both of which are significant findings for better health.
According to Kristina Petersen, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at Texas Tech University, eating avocados on a daily basis improved the overall quality of the participants’ diets by eight points on a scale of 100.
“Our findings show that eating 1 avocado per day can significantly improve overall diet quality,” says Petersen. Adherence to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is frequently low in the United States. We are aware that a higher dietary quality is associated with a lower risk of a variety of ailments, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and various cancers; so, this is critical knowledge.
The study, conducted in collaboration with UCLA, Tufts, and Loma Linda University, was just published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Wake Forest University assisted with coordination.
Cholesterol and Diet
More than 1,000 overweight or obese persons took part in the six-month trial, with half of them encouraged to consume one avocado every day while the other half ate their usual diet.
“Eating one avocado a day did not result in body weight increase, but it did not lead to clinically relevant changes in belly fat and other cardiometabolic risk factors,” says Joan Sabate, a professor at Loma Linda University School of Public Health. This is excellent news because consuming extra avocado calories has no influence on total and LDL cholesterol while having no effect on body weight or belly fat.
They also observed that consuming avocados on a daily basis lowered LDL cholesterol by 2.5 mg/dL and total cholesterol by 2.9 mg/dL.
The researchers want to continue analysing the study’s findings in the future. Future study might look at how participants incorporated avocados into their diet and see whether there were any differences in the results based on how individuals ate the avocados because, for example, participants were not given instructions on how to take their avocados every day.
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