Eating one avocado a day can improve overall diet quality, according to a team led by researchers in Penn State’s Department of Nutritional Sciences. Poor diet quality is a risk factor for many diseases, including heart disease, and many American adults have poor-quality diets and do not meet key dietary recommendations provided by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
This study was led by Kristina Petersen, associate professor of nutritional sciences, and Penny Kris-Etherton, retired professor of nutritional sciences at Evan Pugh University, and was recently published in the journal Current advances in nutrition. The researchers examined how a food-based intervention (one avocado per day) affects overall diet quality.
“Avocados are a nutrient-dense food, containing lots of fiber and other important nutrients. We wanted to see if regular intake of this food would lead to an increase in diet quality,” Petersen said. “Previous observational research suggests that avocado consumers have a higher quality diet than non-consumers. Therefore, we developed this study to determine if there is a causal link between avocado consumption and overall diet quality.”
Petersen said that because only 2% of American adults are regular avocado consumers, researchers wanted to determine whether including avocados in an individual’s daily diet could significantly increase the quality of their diet.
Researchers conducted telephone interviews with participants before the study began and at times throughout the study to determine what their dietary intake was in the previous 24 hours and assessed their diets using the Healthy Eating Index to determine how well They met the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. . Compliance with guidelines was used as a measure of overall diet quality.
The study had 1,008 participants who were divided into two groups. One group continued their usual diet and limited their avocado consumption during the 26-week study, while the other group added one avocado per day to their diet.
“We found that participants who ate one avocado a day significantly increased their compliance with dietary guidelines,” Petersen said. “This suggests that strategies, such as eating one avocado a day, may help people follow dietary guidelines and improve the quality of their diets.”
Although the researchers said they were not surprised to see that eating avocados daily improved diet quality, they had not predicted how the participants could achieve this.
“We determined that participants were using avocados as a substitute for some foods high in refined grains and sodium,” Petersen said. “In our study, we classified avocados as vegetables and saw an increase in vegetable consumption attributed to avocado intake, but also participants used avocados to replace some unhealthy options.”
According to Petersen, having a poor-quality diet substantially increases the risk of diseases such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, and many other preventable diseases.
“By improving people’s adherence to dietary guidelines, we can help reduce the risk of developing these chronic conditions and prolong healthy life expectancy,” Petersen said.
Petersen has also conducted similar studies investigating the impact of food-based interventions, including the relationship between pistachios and diet quality, but said more research is needed to determine what other food-based strategies can be used to improve people’s adherence to dietary guidelines.
“In studies like this, we can determine food-based ways to improve diet quality, but behavioral strategies are also needed to help people meet dietary guidelines and reduce the risk of chronic diseases,” Petersen said.
Other contributors to the study include Sydney Smith and David M. Reboussin of Wake Forest University School of Medicine; Alice H. Lichtenstein and Nirupa R. Matthan, Tufts University; Zhaoping Li, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles; and Joan Sabate, Sujatha Rajaram, and Gina Segovia-Siapco, Loma Linda University.
The Avocado Nutrition Center supported this study. The funder had no influence on data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the published study.