"The Effects of Avocados on Inflammation"
In the preface of How Not to Die,
after bemoaning the fact that I never got taken
out to dinner by Big Broccoli,
I wrote that you’ll never probably see an ad
on TV for whole natural foods,
because there’s just not much of a markup;
they’re not shelf-stable, you can’t brand them,
patent them, trademark them.
Real food just isn’t as profitable as junk.
But, I may have to eat those words;
there was evidently a TV ad for avocados,
and during the Super Bowl no less.
Not like avocado-flavored Doritos or something,
but an ad for the actual fruit,
thanks to billions of avocados sold every year,
giving the Avocado Board $50 million
not only for ads but for research.
I previously touched on their burger study,
in which adding avocado blunted the spike
in inflammation one gets within hours of eating meat.
So they added more fat, more calories,
but got less inflammation,
perhaps because they were adding that fat
and calories in the form of a whole plant food,
which tends to be packed with antioxidants,
which can inhibit the formation of oxidized fats
that are formed when meat is cooked
and when it hits your stomach acid.
Do other high fat, high calorie whole plant foods
have the same protective effect?
What about peanuts, for example?
We didn't know…
until now.
Not to be outdone by Big Guac,
the “Peanut Institute” funded this study
with the understanding that most of us
spend most of our waking hours in a postprandial state,
in other words, an after-meal state,
and the fat coursing through our systems
from those meals is a well-recognized risk factor for atherosclerosis,
the #1 killer of men and women,
and manifests as impaired endothelial function,
meaning crippled artery function,
within hours of a crappy meal, like a milkshake:
1200 calories of mostly sugar and heavy cream.
OK, but what if you drink that same milkshake
with 3 ounces of peanuts added?
Now, to match up the added fat and protein,
they had to add some oil and egg whites
and even threw in a fiber supplement
to try to match the nutritional profile
of the added peanuts as closely as possible.
So, here you have two milk shakes,
pretty much same calories, same amount of sugar,
same amount of protein,
same amount of fat—
same amount of saturated fat, same fiber.
So, on paper, they should cause the same reaction in the body,
but peanuts are whole plant foods;
and so, what you don’t see listed here
are the thousands of phytonutrients
in the peanut milkshake,
missing from the non-peanut milkshake.
Would it make any difference?
That's what the study aimed to find out.
This is showing artery function
before either milkshake is ingested,
the ability of our arteries to relax and dilate normally.
Within hours of consuming the non-peanut milkshake,
all that saturated fat and sugar clamps artery function down
about 20%--one milkshake!
OK, but what if you ate
the same amount of sugar and saturated fat
but with a little real food floating in it?
No significant drop.
So, the peanuts helped preserve artery function
in response to the endothelial insult,
a cardio-protective effect presumably due to
the active phytonutrients in peanuts.
Now, walnuts may work even better.
Eat a salami and cheese sandwich with some olive oil
and artery function plummets like a third,
but replace that olive oil with the same amount of
plant fat in the form of whole walnuts,
and you don’t just blunt the effect
of the salami and cheese but reverse it,
ending up actually better than you started out.
What about avocados?
Research indicates that calorie-dense foods
increase inflammation and oxidation,
thereby contributing to the development of artery disease.
However, it’s not clear whether the high calorie load alone,
irrespective of the nutritional content
of the ingested food, produces that postprandial, after-the-meal,
oxidation and inflammatory activity.
So, what this study did was compare
the impact of high-calorie junk,
high-fat, high-sugar ice cream,
a “phytonutrient-reduced” food—
that’s an understatement—
compared to the effects
of the exact same number of calories
from a calorie dense, phytonutrient-rich
whole plant food, avocado.
If it’s just the concentration of calories,
the concentration of fat,
they should have the same effect.
They tested reactions to 4 different meals,
ice cream versus avocado,
versus just the fat and protein
from the ice cream
to separate out the sugar,
and then just the amount of sugar in the ice cream,
to separate out the effects of the saturated butterfat.
So, two pints of ice cream,
versus just the cream,
versus just the sugar—no fat,
versus about 4 avocados,
which ends up having about
three times the fat as ice cream
and the same amount of saturated fat,
and the same whopping load of calories.
OK, so what happened?
Eat the ice cream, or just the sugar-free components,
or just the sugar,
and the level of oxidative stress
in people’s bloodstreams goes up,
but this is not observed after ingestion
of a calorie-equivalent whole plant food.
Unlike the ice cream,
ingestion of the whole-food avocado,
even though it’s packed with calories and fat,
did not produce a rise in oxidative or inflammatory activity,
suggesting that the after- meal oxidative stress
observed after eating foods such as ice cream
may be due to their isolation from nutrients like antioxidants.
Sugar is ok in fruit form,
because it comes naturally prepackaged with phytonutrients;
similarly, the fat in whole plant foods,
like nuts and avocados,
comes prepackaged with a rich matrix
of phytochemicals and, therefore,
doesn’t demonstrate the same potential
for oxidative damage.