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Eating one avocado a day may improve overall diet quality, according to a team led by researchers at Penn State’s Office of Nutritional Sciences. Poor diet quality is a risk factor for many diseases, including heart disease, and many American adults eat a poor diet and fail to meet important dietary recommendations provided by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. yeah.

The study was led by Christina Petersen, associate professor of nutritional sciences, and Penny Chris Eaterton, former professor of nutritional sciences at Evan Pugh University, and was recently published in the journal Current Developments in Nutrition. Researchers investigated how a food-based intervention (one avocado per day) affected overall diet quality.

“Avocados are a highly nutritious food, rich in fiber and other important nutrients. We wanted to see if regular consumption of this food could improve the quality of your diet. ,” Petersen said. “Previous observational studies suggest that avocado consumers have higher dietary quality than non-consumers. We therefore hypothesized that there may be a link between avocado intake and overall dietary quality. We developed this study to determine whether there is a relationship.”

Professor Petersen said that since only 2% of American adults consume avocados regularly, researchers are wondering whether including avocados in an individual’s daily diet significantly improves diet quality. He said he wanted to judge.

Researchers conducted telephone interviews with participants before the start of the study and at several points throughout the study to determine what their dietary intake was in the past 24 hours, using a healthy eating index. to assess their diets and determine how well they adhered to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. . Adherence to guidelines was used as a measure of overall diet quality.

The study involved 1,008 participants divided into two groups. One group continued with their normal diet and limited their avocado intake during his 26-week study, while the other group continued to eat only one avocado per day in their diet. I did.

“We found that participants who ate an avocado a day had significantly improved adherence to dietary guidelines,” Petersen said. “This suggests that strategies such as eating an avocado a day can help people follow dietary guidelines and improve the quality of their diet.”

The researchers said they were not surprised that eating avocado daily improved diet quality, but they did not predict how the participants were able to achieve this.

“We determined that participants were using avocados as a substitute for refined grains and some foods high in sodium,” Petersen said. “While our study classified avocado as a vegetable and found increased vegetable intake attributable to avocado consumption, participants were substituting avocado for unhealthy options.”

According to Petersen, a poor diet significantly increases your risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, and many other preventable diseases.

“By improving people’s adherence to dietary guidelines, we can reduce their risk of developing these chronic diseases and extend their healthy lives,” Petersen said.

Professor Petersen is also conducting similar research investigating the impact of food-based interventions, such as the relationship between pistachios and diet quality, but also what other approaches to improving people’s adherence to dietary guidelines. He said further research is needed to determine whether food-based strategies can be used.

“Studies like this one can determine food-based methods to improve diet quality, but also the actions that can help people adhere to dietary guidelines and reduce their risk of chronic disease. We also need a strategy,” Petersen said.

reference: Petersen KS, Smith S, Lichtenstein AH, et al. Consuming one avocado per day as part of your usual intake improves diet quality: exploratory results from a randomized controlled trial. Ka Dev Nuttle. 2024;8(2):102079. Doi: 10.1016/j.cdnut.2024.102079

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