An avocado a day keeps the doctor away.
New research has found that eating one avocado every single day is associated with health benefits, including improved sleep and diet quality.
“We do know from prior work that avocado intake is linked to lowered risk of cardiovascular disease,” Penn State University postdoctoral scholar Dr. Janhavi J. Damani, who was involved in the study, told Healio.
The research, presented recently at the conference Nutrition 2024 in Chicago, builds upon past studies that examined the health benefits of avocado, suggesting that avocadoes can “improve cardiovascular risk factors by reducing total cholesterol and LDL-C without adversely affecting body weight,” according to Damani.
For the current study, the team of researchers conducted an analysis of the Habitual Diet and Avocado Trial (HAT), which involved more than 1,000 participants who were chosen at random to either consume one avocado per day for 6 months or follow their typical diet but eat less than two per month.
In their analysis, Damani’s team assessed the impact of daily avocado consumption on the heart health of people with abdominal obesity, according to Healio.
Utilizing the American heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 — a guideline for cardiovascular health — the team evaluated a sample of 969 people from HAT for diet quality, blood glucose, blood pressure, BMI, blood lipids, physical activity and sleep health, which play a role in cardiovascular health.
They found that the cardiovascular health scores decreased in those who maintained their lifestyles and abstained from avocado consumption, while that “trend was not observed in the avocado-supplemented group,” Damani told Healio.
While there was not a significant different in LE8 scores between the groups, the people who consumed avocados on a daily basis saw an improvement in their scores for sleep health, diet quality and blood lipids, like cholesterol.
“There’s an increasing body of evidence that suggests that, more than just incorporating individual foods, there’s a drive toward adapting healthy dietary patterns to achieve clinically relevant improvements in cardiovascular risk factors,” Damani said.
The study, which was funded by the Hass Avocado Board, could potentially spur further research into the “complex associations” between certain foods and cardiovascular health.
In the meantime, she told Healio that providers should “place more emphasis in increasing diet quality through beneficial changes in the overall dietary pattern.”