Avocados Decrease the Risk of Heart Disease, New Study Shows

Avocados can be found on every “healthiest foods” lists. Nutritionists call them “the wonder food” and recommend them in any diet. The health benefits of avocado are countless. Recent studies have shown that avocados decrease the risk of heart disease if included in the daily diet.

Avocados are famous because of their high content of monounsaturated fatty acids. Previous scientific studies have demonstrated that consuming avocados on a regular basis can lower the bad cholesterol levels, but this new study looks at the implications of avocados from other points of view, not only from the point of view of the monounsaturated fatty acids and their benefits on the human body.

One of the authors of the new study, Penny M. Kris-Etherton, Distinguished Professor of Nutrition, explained that eating an avocado a day as part of a moderate-fat diet can provide additional low-density lipoproteins, compared to a normal moderate-fat diet that doesn’t include avocados. The avocado diet proved to lower the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Professor Kris-Etherton and her team of researchers tested three different diets, diets that were supposed to fight bad cholesterol and lower it. The researchers tested a lower-fat diet that consisted of 24% fat, and two moderate-fat diets, with 34% fat.

The scientists tested the diets on 45 people, between the ages of 21 and 70. All the participants were healthy but overweight. The study showed that all three diets lowered the bad cholesterol levels and the overall cholesterol. But the researchers found that the avocado diet reduced the bad cholesterol and the total cholesterol more than the other two diets.

The diet that included avocado decreased the bad cholesterol level by 13.5 mg/dL, while the other two diets decreased it by 8.3 mg/dL and 7.4 mg/dL.
Professor Kris-Etherton said that a good way to include avocados in the daily diets is to put it into sandwiches or in salads.

The researchers said that they will need to do further studies in order to explore the benefits of avocados and how it can affect the high-density lipoproteins, also known as “the good cholesterol”.
The study that showed avocados decrease the risk of heart disease was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
Image Source: womenshealthmag

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Christina Langfold

Remember that weird girl in school who never quite managed to fit in? Who was always silent and strange? That was me during my entire teenage life. A few years after finishing college (with a degree in arts) I decided that the best way to become more sociable, while also feeling safe, is to test my people skills online.