Prepping for the Super Bowl? Here’s Why Avocados Make a Great Snack

TRANSCRIPT

So we have a couple different studies that we’re doing. One right now is ongoing, and it’s a 12-week study where we have people come in and pick up avocados and include them in their diet every day for 12 weeks. We take blood, and we analyze it, and we look at how it affects their blood lipids, their glucose, and we do a number of other analyses on their blood as well. 

But two studies that we just finished, one that’s published and another one that’s almost published, looked at the acute effects of avocado. And here we were interested in replacing carbohydrates in a meal with avocado without changing the calorie content of that meal, and asking questions relative to insulin and glucose metabolism and also how flexible their vessels would be.

And these are important end points to measure when we’re looking at diabetes and cardiovascular disease risk. And avocados performed really well. The vessels were more flexible when we replaced carbohydrates in meals with avocado, and we also found when we were looking at the satiety effects of avocado that they enhanced the satiety-inducing effects of a meal. 

And we also study some of the physiology that drives this effect and found specific hormones that were associated with avocado intake.