Avocados Linked To Heart Health

1 min

Adding avocado to salads, sandwiches, and other meals twice a week could help protect the heart. That’s according to a large recent study by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. They analyzed data from 68,786 healthy women (ages 30 to 55 years) who participated in the Nurses’ Health Study and 41,701 healthy men (ages 40 to 75 years) who took part in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. The volunteers filled out questionnaires about their diet every four years.

The researchers tracked the participants’ reported consumption of avocado, as well as their incidence of cardiovascular disease and stroke, over the course of 30 years. After ruling out other risk factors, they found that people who ate at least two servings of avocado each week had a 16 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 21 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease, compared to those in the studies who never or rarely ate avocados. The team also found that replacing half a serving daily of margarine, butter, egg, yogurt, cheese, or processed meat with the same amount of avocado was associated with a 16 to 22 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease events, including heart attack and stroke.

“The replacement of certain fat containing foods with avocado could lead to lower risk of [cardiovascular disease],” the researchers concluded. The paper was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Sources:
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.121.024014

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