An avocado a day may improve diet quality, sleep

Key takeaways:

• One avocado a day for 6 months did not increase total cardiovascular health scores but did improve components like blood lipids.
• PCPs should emphasize the importance of improving diet quality, a researcher said.

CHICAGO — Daily avocado intake for half a year did not significantly improve overall cardiovascular health, but it was associated with improvements in certain components, research presented at NUTRITION showed.

“We do know from prior work that avocado intake is linked to lowered risk of cardiovascular disease,” Janhavi J. Damani, MS, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State University, told Healio. “Furthermore, meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials show that avocados improve cardiovascular risk factors by reducing total cholesterol and LDL-C without adversely affecting body weight.”

Damani and colleagues conducted a secondary analysis of the Habitual Diet and Avocado Trial (HAT) to examine the effect of daily avocado intake on cardiovascular health in participants with abdominal obesity.

In HAT, participants were randomly assigned to either an avocado-supplemented diet, in which they consumed one avocado daily for 6 months, or to a habitual diet, in which they followed their typical diet and lifestyle and limited avocado intake to fewer than two a month.

For the current analysis, Damani and colleagues assessed the effects of daily avocado intake in a sample of 969 participants (mean age, 50 years; 72.9% women) using the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 (LE8) metric. The cardiovascular health components that the researchers examined included sleep health, diet quality, BP, blood glucose, BMI, nicotine exposure, physical activity and blood lipids. Both the total LE8 score and component scores ranged from 0 to 100 points.

Damani and colleagues found that both groups had moderate total LE8 scores at baseline and there was no statistically significant difference in the 6-month change in the total LE8 score between the groups.

However, Damani highlighted some noteworthy trends.

“The overall cardiovascular health score did seem to decline in the habitual diet group, whereas this trend was not observed in the avocado-supplemented group,” she said. “There is scope for future work to understand some of these complex associations.”

Additionally, compared with the habitual diet group, the avocado-supplemented group had greater and statistically significant increase in LE8 component scores for:

• diet quality (3.92 points; 95% CI, 1.2-6.64);
• sleep health (3.2 points; 95% CI, 0.38-6.02); and
• blood lipids (3.06 points; 95% CI, 0.41-5.71).

“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.

She added that the main takeaway for health care providers “is to place more emphasis in increasing diet quality through beneficial changes in the overall dietary pattern.”

For more information:

Janhavi J. Damani, MS, PhD, can be reached at jjd467@psu.edu.

References:

• Damani JJ, et al. Abstract P18-012-24. Presented at: NUTRITION; June 29-July 2, 2024; Chicago.
• Life's essential 8. Available at: https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-lifestyle/lifes-essential-8. Accessed July 8, 2024.