An Avocado a Day Might Bring LDL Levels Down

By Andrew M. Seaman

(Reuters Health) - Adding avocados to an already healthy diet may lower LDL cholesterol levels, a new study suggests.

For the new study, researchers assigned 45 otherwise healthy overweight and obese people between ages 21 and 70 to one of three diets aimed at reducing cholesterol.

Participants ate a regular American diet for a two-week run-in period. Then they followed either a low-fat diet without avocado, a moderate-fat diet without avocado or a moderate-fat diet with one avocado added every day.

After two weeks on an American diet, the average LDL cholesterol level was about 128 mg/dL. Five weeks into the assigned diets, average LDL levels had fallen by 7.4 mg/dL in the low-fat without avocado group, 8.3 mg/dL in the moderate-fat without avocado group, and 13.5 mg/dL in the moderate-fat diet with avocado group.

A 13.5 mg/dL reduction in LDL cholesterol may be enough keep people from going on cholesterol-lowering medications, said Penny Kris-Etherton, who chairs the American Heart Association's Nutrition Committee and is a nutrition expert at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

Kris-Etherton said the study also shows that these heart-healthy diets work at lowering LDL cholesterol with or without avocados.

"A healthy diet works, but there are some added benefits from including the avocado," she said.

Kate Patton, a preventive-cardiology dietitian at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, said components of the avocado aside from its monounsaturated fats - vitamins, minerals and fiber - might have given people in the avocado group an edge over the others, who were also on healthy diets.

The study was published online January 5 in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

SOURCE: https://bit.ly/1tPmBlk

J Am Heart Assoc 2015.

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2015. Click For Restrictions - https://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp