Can you gain weight from avocados?
The pear-shaped fruit with the firm shell provides 130 kcal per 100 g of avocado. A large avocado can easily add up to 250 kcal and more. It is therefore understandable that many people believe that avocados make you fat or at least prevent you from losing weight.
However, you don’t have to bend over backwards Avocadosuppe, Guacamole or Avocado-Eiscream make. Because several studies have now looked into the question of whether you gain weight from avocados or not.
By the way: We discuss whether the avocado is a superfood or not in our main article regarding them Avocado.
Avocados don’t make you fat!
Im Journal of the American Heart Association published a randomized study of Penn State University ( 1 ), for which overweight or even obese participants were made to eat 1 avocado daily for 6 months. They then checked (via MRI) her abdominal fat and liver fat. They also measured their waist circumference and cholesterol level and compared the values with those participants who had not eaten avocados.
A total of 1000 people took part in the study. Half ate avocados in the following months in addition to their normal diet, the other half should continue to eat as normal (and were not allowed to eat more than 2 avocados per month).
The avocado eaters didn’t gain liver or belly fat despite the extra calories from avocados, so they didn’t gain any weight, so it’s clear that avocados don’t make you fat. Previous smaller studies had even shown that avocados led to a reduction in weight and circumference in obese people.
Avocados encourage healthy eating
The positive influence of avocado consumption may have come from the fact that the avocado group suddenly ate healthier overall. The reason for this might be that avocados taste best with salads and vegetable dishes, so that the nutritional quality automatically improves even if you are “forced” to eat avocados every day.
You can find delicious avocado recipes in our ZDG cooking studio, e.g. B. Quinoa with vegetables in an avocado mango sauce or Potato balls with avocado dip or Lentil stew with avocado.
Another advantage of avocados is their fat quality. Like olive oil, avocado fat consists in particular of monounsaturated fatty acids, which inhibit the storage of fats even with a high-fat diet ( 3 ). Replacing saturated fats with monounsaturated fats showed that monounsaturated fats led to weight loss for the same calorie intake ( 4 ).
Avocados lower cholesterol levels
In the avocado group, the cholesterol level fell – presumably due to the fat quality of the avocado and the improved diet of the test subjects. Total cholesterol levels fell by an average of 2.9 mg/dl and LDL cholesterol levels by 2.5 mg/dl, which is generally associated with a lower cardiovascular risk.
Previous studies had shown that avocados can improve cholesterol levels, e.g. B. a study from 2015 ( 2 ): If you eat so many avocados every day that they make up 17 percent of the daily calorie intake with a total fat content of the diet of 34 percent, then the LDL cholesterol level drops by as much as 13 mg/dl following 5 weeks. We tell regarding it in our article The cholesterol-lowering effects of avocados.
(Example: At 1900 kcal daily, 17 percent would be 323 kcal, which would correspond to 270 g of avocado (2 small or 1 large)).
Read all regarding them here Life cycle assessment of the avocado and whether the fruit is in fact an eco-disaster, as has been said over and over once more.